By the same measure, every country in Europe would have had 10% of the deaths had they implemented the Norway and Finland model. Why didn’t they?
Sweden correspondent signing in.
Boasts of citizens not dying during a global pandemic could be compared to not losing any soldiers in a battle. At the end of the day, who cares?
People die. I have a friend working in these care homes and those dying are the portion who one has to make the food into mush for them to be able to digest it. Better off dead, if you ask me.
If you took a national poll here that if we could turn the clock back here and do it again with much tighter restrictions, the cold heartedness of the numbers would shock a few outrage merchants.
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Because they closed their borders early and kept them closed. Like New Zealand and Australia, they have been open internally most of the time since March 2020.
Lockdowns as we know them in the rest of the western world didn’t work, as there was community spread from early on and it just ebbed and flowed in waves as any pandemic does.
Also, I think it’s important that the majority of the electorate support the approach of the government in it’s covid strategy in different countries.
If not, it’s up to the electorate to let them know. The Irish electorate historically have no backbone. Politicans have been riding them senseless for years. Giddy up.
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Stop telling lies.
Lads, this fella was screaming shut up shop early doors. He’s only pulling the piss with ye.
Now there are a couple of others who believe Sweden were spot on but they’re being serious.
Outline the lies. How did Norway and Finland accomplish such low deaths compared to Ireland. Age adjusted Ireland is the same as Sweden.
These are the measures you describe as “communist” and “totalitarian”.
Lockdowns have always worked. Nobody has ever claimed they are a long term solution.
Wrong again unsurprisingly. Stopping travel early from the source of the pandemic would have been sensible. As would ongoing border restrictions. Were you in favor or against stopping travel from China early on? Leftists described it as racist and xenophobic, but on reflection it was obvious. What I regard as totalitarian is enforced lockdown of a healthy population, police surveillance of the population, closing businesses, etc.
Lockdowns involving a whole population has never been done in history, quarantine of the sick and vulnerable yes.
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So you’re both for it and against it. Simultaneously. OK.
I am for sensible measures.
Beware of media/political false narratives that anyone concerned about 19th July opening is ‘pro-lockdown’. The govt, has conveniently framed policy as ‘lockdown’ vs ‘open-up’, when many countries have kept people safe without needing long-term restrictions.
Let’s be clear- lockdowns are a failure of public health strategy- this means that countries have acted too late, and not taken basic measures at a point in time when cases were low, to pre-empt this.
Unfortunately, without good test, trace, isolate systems, mitigations in schools, workplaces, with surges in cases compounded by new variants either emerging or being imported due to failures of policy- lockdowns have been used in the UK as the primary strategy to contain spread.
The govt has had to resort to prolonged lockdowns 3 times due to their late responses, re-opening too early at each point, lack of willingness to fix systems like test, trace, isolate & support that could’ve prevented this, and complete failure in controlling school transmission.
When I do media now, and am asked about re-opening on the 19th, & when I don’t support this, I’m then cast as ‘pro-lockdown’, when I’ve tried my best to push for policies that would’ve prevented these. Lockdowns have been necessary because basic public health has been ignored.
As @trishgreenhalgh puts very eloquently here, masks, while only a very minor inconvenience, actually increase our freedoms, because they let us do a lot more by keeping infection rates low, and protecting everyone:
And what about ventilation? Ventilation doesn’t restrict anyone. If the govt so wants life to return to normal, why not invest in ventilation that would make it possible for people to be in workplaces, and children to be in schools in a safer way, and allow schools to stay open.
A better test, trace, isolate & support system doesn’t require restrictions - in fact it ensures cases are picked up early and people can isolate with support so transmission chains are broken. This keeps cases low, ensuring that we don’t need lockdowns, & schools can stay open.
These measures don’t involve ‘restrictions’ - and have been put in place in so many countries. So why is the debate always framed as ‘lockdowns’ vs ‘open up’, when we can actually open up in a safe way as many countries across the globe have done.
Many countries in SE Asia to date never had national lockdowns because of their amazing public health systems, and aggressive early action. So let’s stop being ignorant and isolationist in our narratives in the media, and stop framing this as a false choice.
Yes, this is the framing of the govt, and it’s a convenient one because it suggests that lockdowns are the only way to do this, and the govt is being compassionate in their current strategy of opening up in the middle of a raging pandemic. This is a deflection of responsibility.
It gives the public a choice between tolerating restrictions that have an impact on economy or tolerating mass infection, long COVID, and the risk of new escape variants that may threaten vaccines. When those are both bad choices.
The reason we’ve been left with these choices is because our govt has steadfastly failed for the last 16 months to put in place good test, trace, isolate & support systems, mask mandates, investment in ventilation in workplaces & schools, border measures that would keep us safe.
So they’ve successfully moved the discussion to lockdown vs open up, because much of the media also now thinks of as lockdown as a public health strategy.
Lockdown isn’t a public health strategy- it’s a failure of a public health strategy.
The sooner our media understand this, the sooner we can demand better for our communities and our children.
Many of the most effective mitigations don’t mean more restrictions- but need more investment. So let’s stop pretending that we only have two choices here- both bad ones.
That’s a very sensible article mate. We can all agree that NPHET have made an absolute hames of this and their ongoing reliance on lockdowns, and refusal to engage in other measures that might help, such as track and trace, antigen testing, ventilation etc is a national scandal. Welcome aboard
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We continually needed lockdowns because we have no functioning public health system and because we did not have an alternative plan in place. A major reason we did not have an alternative plan in place is because the pub, restaurant and airline lobbies refused to understand the first thing about this virus and are very vocal and influential over politics, thus NPHET were continually overruled. Even now this situation persists. Business has no interest in long term plans. Neither does the OIUTF cult.
The game has always been business v public health, with business refusing to understand that by playing the game in this way it was cutting off its nose to spite its face. Public health and economic health should have always been on the same side, but business refused to see that. And the government stood there in the middle like sheep.
I’ve given up on having arguments on this topic, as everyone is settled on their position and will twist everything to suit their own views. It will take ten years or more before the rights and wrongs of everything are decided, maybe longer, so it seems foolish to waste any more time on it. But I will throw in my 2 cents on this and leave you at it after that.
Our airline industry has been destroyed and we have had the longest closure of pubs and restaurants in Europe, to the point where we are still an outlier on indoor dining, and we have had this in conjunction with the longest lockdown in Europe and one of the longest in the World.
If that is pubs, restaurants and airlines getting their way, I’d hate to see what them not getting their way looks like.
The reality is NPHET have no plan whatsoever, other than lockdown, lockdown, lockdown, it’s only by a semi miracle that we have a vaccine that is eventually going to save them. If it hadn’t come along I shudder to think what the fuck they would have done.
NPHET/HSE (and they are basically the same thing with the overlap and joint interests etc), had three jobs.
- Increase testing, they did this eventually, because they had to, but it was disgracefully slow in getting to the required capacity. We still don’t have enough testing capacity to move onto the wider stage of events etc. and bizarrely rather than seeing it as a potential solution for their failures in this department, they’ve just dismissed antigen testing out of hand. Every other country in the World that can get them is using them, but Tony has decided they are no good, against all scientific evidence (from people far more knowledgeable on the subject than him). They aren’t a miracle solution, but they obviously have a place, and it’s an absolute fucking disgrace that they won’t allow them, be used in the capacity that they can be.
- Track and trace. It’s hardly worth a paragraph. They didn’t do it at the start and they still don’t do it. A complete and utter abject failure.
- Hospital capacity. A year and 4 months in and we are told hospitals are at capacity at the moment, with fuck all covid cases in there. They’ve added on a few beds, by cannibalizing other services, but that’s it. I appreciate it takes time to get something like an ICU bed off the ground, but they basically haven’t even tried. Was there any construction started? I mean we’ve fuck all ICU capacity anyway, so it’s not like if the whole thing blew over next week, that the ICU beds would go to waste.
That’s before you even get into the amount of people who caught it and died from it in Nursing homes and hospitals due to NPHET/HSE’s complete failure to implement correct protocols to protect patients and staff.
Not only are NPHET not embarrassed by these failures, but they use their shortcomings as reasons to continue to keep us in an interminable lockdown. We don’t have hospital capacity, we can’t handle the numbers for track and trace, we can’t test enough people for events etc etc etc etc.
And you can somehow defend them? And say it’s not their fault? It’s the people who have had their businesses destroyed who are to blame? Businesses that have basically been shuttered the entire time because NPHET have tried nothing and they are all out of ideas.
You can have any opinion you want, and I appreciate this is an emotive issue for you. But to paint NPHET as the victims in this. Come on man. Cop onto yourself.
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Good post. The one above was possibly his most nonsense one yet.
2 work war’s and the world Cup will be eclipsed by a euros and beating covid in a week
The reason we don’t have any of those things is because over many decades, we have elected governments who aren’t particularly interested in the capacity of the state to do difficult things. The same reasons we don’t have track and trace and functioning public health teams are the same reasons we don’t have social housing. This stuff goes right back to the founding ideology of the state and the obsession with anti-communism. That isn’t NPHET’s fault.
Antigen testing is no magic bullet.
If only Ireland had d’aul bit of communism, could have had free gaffs for everyone.
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