It needs to be pointed out that the Rapid growth seen in Dublin had levelled off before Level 3.
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I was in Milan and they were all wearing masks with temperature checks everywhere but nobody seemed to give a fuck about contact tracing.
Realistically, everywhere is going to have to accept renewed ripples of this and chill out about comparing case numbers to March and April.
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They made a right fuck of it on the m7 this morning and all the cars just went into the truck lane and ignored the checkpoint. 
The checkpoint outside abbeyfeale took slightly longer to get through
I said it earlier but reckon it’s happening for that extra week. Nolan can claim what he likes but schools can’t be impacting R by 0.5 in the U.K. and for you to have a hope of getting R down to 0.5 in Ireland. Teenagers spread this thing and it’s well established at this point.
I have some sympathy for the Government in how they play this as Breda is all guns blazing for everything to be locked down. There is a momentum with back to school that they’ll lose. The teacher unions are also acting the maggot. You take an extra week and many will cry about being sent back into a warzone the week after.
But this all comes back to risk/trade offs and failing to explain this fact of life to the public in April and May. Ireland should have followed Europe and got kids back to school in April and May, ahead of even business openings. Dr Tony was having none of it though.
I’m not sure Irish school holidays are linked (I’m pretty sure summer holidays were linked to farming season though?) but I know in Boston that the timing of school breaks were designed to break flu season transmission. Part and parcel with the Living with Covid plan should have been a contingency for an extra week in the winter.
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We wouldn’t get to use it anyway because those green cunts would feck it ip.
Is there rioting in Dublin tonight?
I’ve noticed a slight shift in public sentiment. In comments online etc. People starting to turn on the government a bit more. I’d still say the majority are pissed off the government isn’t taking away more of their civil rights
Didnt notice anything out of the ordinary that end. Probably get going tomorrow.
Few videos going around alright.
There’s an unreal amount of fireworks going non-stop but that’s been the case for weeks.
Dublin is on fire.
The people have risen up.
Will the Gardai be able to spare a man from “Operation Stop People Visiting Family” to deal with it?
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Guards not fuckinag around by the looks of it
That time of the month for her.
Decent overview here in the New York Times. Apologies for the formatting.
Where Europe’s Second Wave Is Filling Up Hospitals
By Allison McCann and Lauren LeatherbyOct. 22, 2020
Cases per 100,000
in the last 14 days
100
200
400
800
Belgium has postponed
all non-essential hospital
work to deal with the influx
of new Covid-19 patients.
FINLAND
NORWAY
SWEDEN
BELARUS
IRELAND
U.K.
POLAND
GERMANY
UKRAINE
HUNGARY
FRANCE
ROMANIA
ITALY
SERBIA
SPAIN
GREECE
About a fifth of
Spain’s ICU beds are
already occupied by
Covid-19 patients.
Cases are rising faster in
the Czech Republic than
anywhere else in Europe.
Physicians there fear a
shortage of medical staff.
Source: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, New York Times database of cases
LONDON — Poland has turned its largest stadium into an emergency field hospital. The numbers of Covid-19 patients in Belgium and Britain have doubled in two weeks. And doctors and nurses in the Czech Republic are falling ill at an alarming rate.
As new cases of the virus began to increase again across Europe last month, hospitals were initially spared the mass influx of patients they weathered earlier this spring. Some suggested that the virus had become less deadly, or that older, more vulnerable people would be shielded.
But a second wave of serious illness is here, new data released on Thursday shows, making it clear that the pandemic is still dangerous and that adherence to control measures over the next few weeks will be crucial in preventing hospitals from becoming overrun for a second time this year.
Where People Are Sick From the Coronavirus
| Patients in hospital per 100,000 | Spring peak | % of spring peak | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Czech Republic | 35 | 4 | 882% |
| Spain | 29 | ||
| Belgium | 22 | 50 | 43% |
| Bulgaria | 21 | 6 | 381% |
| Poland | 21 | 9 | 230% |
| Hungary | 18 | 7 | 249% |
| France | 16 | 48 | 34% |
| 21 European countries | 14 | 31 | 45% |
| Italy | 13 | 55 | 24% |
| Slovenia | 13 | 6 | 226% |
| Croatia | 12 | 9 | 136% |
| Slovakia | 12 | 4 | 285% |
| United States | 11 | 18 | 61% |
| Portugal | 11 | 13 | 83% |
| United Kingdom | 10 | 30 | 33% |
| Austria | 8 | 12 | 68% |
| Ireland | 6 | 18 | 31% |
| Luxembourg | 5 | 35 | 15% |
| Latvia | 4 | 2 | 163% |
| Estonia | 3 | 12 | 23% |
| Denmark | 2 | 9 | 23% |
| Finland | 1 | 4 | 23% |
| Norway | 1 | 6 | 10% |
| Iceland | 0.3 | 12 | 2% |
Source: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Hospital data for Europe includes 21 countries that report daily hospital occupancy data to the ECDC. Germany, the Netherlands and others are omitted. Spring peak is the highest value from March and April, except for Hungary where data collection began in May. Current patients in hospitals reflect the most recent available data.
The number of Covid-19 patients in hospitals across the continent is still less than half of the peak in March and April, but it is rising steadily each week, according to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. People across much of Europe — including larger countries like France, Italy, Poland and Spain — are now more likely to be hospitalized with Covid-19 than those in the United States.
Bruno Ciancio, the head of disease surveillance at the center, said he was concerned that some of the worst-hit countries now — including the Czech Republic, Poland and Bulgaria — were not as affected this spring, and may not have expanded their hospital capacity or intensive care units.
“The signals were all there in September,” said Mr. Ciancio. “At this point it’s very important that all member states prepare their hospitals to deal with the increase in demand that is coming.”
Hospitalization rates are a key measure of the pandemic’s severity. The rates rise and fall days or weeks behind the tallies of new infections. But infection figures depend heavily on each country’s testing capacity, while seriously ill people tend to enter hospitals whether they have been tested for the virus or not.
Europe’s current wave of infection is due in part to the relative normalcy it experienced this summer. Unlike the United States, where the epidemic rose to a second peak in July and a third peak this month, travelers moved around Europe, college students returned to campus and many large gatherings resumed, all while the virus kept spreading.
Now hospitals are scrambling to prepare for an onrush of Covid-19 patients, at a time when bed and intensive care capacity will already be under strain during the winter flu season.
Europe’s Second Wave
Hospitalized Covid-19 patients per 100,000 people
MarchMayJulySept.1020304050AustriaBelgiumBulgariaCroatiaCzech RepublicDenmarkEstoniaFinlandFranceHungaryIcelandIrelandItalyLatviaLuxembourgNorwayPolandPortugalSlovakiaSloveniaUnited Kingdom
Source: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
In Poland, the government converted the country’s largest stadium into a temporary field hospital with room for 500 patients. Hospitals in France, especially in the Paris area, have started to postpone non-emergency surgeries, while others have called back staff on leave. More than one-fifth of Spain’s intensive care beds are occupied by Covid-19 patients, and in Madrid, that figure is closer to 40 percent.
And in the Czech Republic — where the current hospitalization rate surpasses the worst period in Britain — physicians are worried about a shortage of staff. “In some regions, about 10 percent of the medical staff is either already infected or in quarantine,” said Petr Smejkal, the chief of infectious diseases and epidemiology at the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Prague.
Mr. Smejkal said the country also lacks specialty workers like respiratory therapists, and that most nurses are not trained to operate ventilators. “I am most worried about personnel, and keeping a safe ratio of doctors to patients and nurses to patients,” he added.
There is hope that no place will experience the level of death that Bergamo, Italy, New York City and Madrid suffered this spring. How the virus spreads is better understood now, and treatments have improved, giving sick people a better chance of survival. Testing has expanded across Europe, allowing countries to identify outbreaks earlier, when they are easier to contain.
But it is unclear how successful those control measures will be, or if political resistance and collective exhaustion over new restrictions will make it harder to get the virus under control for a second time.
Deaths in most of Europe remain at a fraction of the levels seen in the spring. But they have ticked slowly upwards over the last several weeks, and they tend to lag hospitalizations by about a month. Experts say additional increases in deaths are likely over the next couple of weeks.
Covid-19 deaths are slowly ticking back up
Deaths per one million people over the last 14 days
Albania
Mar. 1Oct. 21 Last two weeks
Austria
Belarus
Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bulgaria
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Kosovo
Latvia
Lithuania
Moldova
Netherlands
North Macedonia
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
U.K.
Ukraine
Source: The New York Times. Shows countries with at least 1 million people.
Map administrative boundaries: EuroGeographics, UN–FAO, Turkstat, Kartverket. Instituto Nacional de Estatística, Statistics Portugal. OS data: Crown, copyright and database right 2020. Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0.
Additional reporting by Tolek Magdziarz from Warsaw, Constant Méheut from Paris and Raphael Minder from Madrid.
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11 people arrested.
I jogged past the front door of the local Smyths this morning around 7:30am and there was a young lad with a drill putting together a counter for the front door. I picked up a slide there on click and collect during the last lockdown. And yes, I’d plenty of fun with it.
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How are yer sales this year mate?