He doesnāt answer questions.
But the 13 months have all been part of the pandemic. The pandemic has lasted this long because what seemed the easy option last summer was in fact the very hard option, much harder than the alternative, which would have been hard, and would have been unfair on a lot people, but what happened has been much, much harder and more unfair.
In my previous post I acknowledged that the absolute worst case scenario, ie. no restrictions and no behaviour modification on the part of the population, could not have happened, not least because of public pressure. Itās human nature to want to protect yourself and others. The behaviour of people was always likely to be some sort of a variation of a midpoint between either extreme. The stoicism of the people in Ireland to me has been rather remarkable and far from the popular imagination it seems obvious to me that weāre largely sticking with restrictions. As regards modelling it was imperative that the worst case scenario be mapped out so people knew what we were dealing with. I do think McConkey has gone a bit over the top but Iād take somebody who goes over the top on the cautious side any day, over the opposite - which is gross irresponsibility.
This pandemic was always going to fall unfairly on the have nots. The toll of death and illness did. So did restrictions. So did lack of restrictions. Thatās the unequal way of the world, sadly. Whichever way government moved was always going to be unfair in some way. The question was, could we find an approach which was unfair to the least amount of people. We havenāt done that, we didnāt get near that. Some others have found a way. The approach we did take was bad, but much less bad and more humane than āopen it upā. Weāre all frustrated and believe me when I say Iām more frustrated than any of you, because my father only caught Covid when he had to go into hospital for a treatable UTI, at just the wrong time, literally the day after Christmas. In fact he was scheduled to be coming home the very morning we heard he had tested positive.
Fergusonās behaviour was irrelevant to his modelling. His behaviour may have had an extremely minor impact on public sentiment, he isnāt very well known or much of a public figure, but he paid a price for it. Dominic Cummingsā behaviour had a far greater impact because he was at the heart of the UK government, it was a tipping point in an already very bad situation where the UK government demonstrated that there was one rule for them and another rule for the general public.
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RIP
Sorry.to hear about your dad
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Sorry to hear that Cheasty.
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Iām very sorry to hear about your father.
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The UK covid related death figures must be treated with a pinch of salt.
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Sorry for your loss Sid. I hope your doing okay.
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I would nearly say all figures in relation to covid cases/deaths need to at the very least be treated with an asterisk, mate.
Sorry to hear about your father @Cheasty
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Except that the primary reason cases declined so much last summer wasnāt what we were doing, itās because Covid is seasonal like the flu. There are lots of studies that have confirmed this, one from the University of Illinois looked at 221 countries and found a direct relationship to temperature and latitude. The flu season in our hemisphere lasts from Nov to April, peaking in January. With no mitigation whatsoever it goes away in May and returns in November, and the cycle repeats. Exactly what happened with Covid, and to make matter worse Covid is far more contagious than any flu virus.
As you say the options were elimination or live with it. Elimination would have involved closing borders in March, shut down travel, mandatory quarantine for the small numbers admitted, and efficient test and trace of any cases or clusters. You would then have to stay in that mode until vaccines arrived and were administered to at least half the population. At the time of course we had no idea when vaccines would arrive, so one year, two years, as long as it takes. It simply couldnāt be done in the US, next to impossible in continental Europe, could have been done in the UK and Ireland I suppose if the political will were there, but it would have had to be done on both islands.
The problem with the course we took was when the next season arrived in November, we had a huge portion of the population who had not been exposed and very little immunity, so the winter wave was always going to be worse, and worst in countries and US states that had been relatively unscathed in the first wave. Itās actually an action replay of 1918. Every single country that hadnāt pursued an elimination strategy had the winter wave that peaked in January, regardless of what mode of lockdown they were in beforehand or how long it had lasted. California never lifted restrictions much and was in very strict lockdown since December 7, and still had a brutal winter wave that was 4X larger than the spring 2020 wave.
Having said all that, thereās a lot more we could have done though in terms of protection and preparation. Sorry again about your dad, itās a bit scandalous that Irish hospitals were such a source of infection in Dec - Jan, but the virus was pretty much rampant everywhere at that stage, and many of them are not very good at infectious disease management at the best of times.
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Very sorry for your loss bud
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Sorry to hear about your dad Sid. May he rest in peace.
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Iām not convinced by the seasonal or temperature argument, not in any significant sense anyway. Covid ran rampant last summer in different areas of the US which have a far higher average temperature than Ireland. It has run rampant in Manaus which is on the equator. South Africaās largest wave was during their summer just gone. Itās running rampant in India at the moment and India has average temperatures in the low 30s celsius currently.
When we got down to very low figures last summer, we were coming off the back of three months of lockdown, these low figures were a result of lockdown - a result of people staying away from each other physically. The low figures werenāt a result of seasonality. The figures started to bounce back up in July when we got more lax and foreign travel and pubs and then schools and all the rest started and the rate of increase from then until October was pretty steady. Lockdown came in and it went down again. We opened up on December 1st at 200 odd cases, far too high a figure to open up from, we then had the highest level of human interaction on a societal level since the pandemic started, and hey presto, it ramped up in a big way again. We shut down again, and cases went down again, despite it being the depths of winter.
Nor am I convinced that āthe more people get outā, the safer it is, not in any meaningful sense at any rate. Yes, if youāre outdoors, it is safer for the duration of the time you are outdoors but almost certainly only for that particular duration of time. Even in summer, people spend most of their time indoors. We spend the majority of our time indoors whatever the season. Say for arguments sake, you spend an average of four hours per day outdoors during the summer ā and thatās a very generous assumption for most people, I think. For those four hours, yes, youāre reasonably safe as regards picking up Covid. But if you spend four hours a day outdoors, that means you still spend 20 hours indoors.
Say in winter you spend 23 hours indoors a day or most days. Is there much of a difference between spending 20 hours per day indoors versus 23 hours a day? A slight difference at most. 20 hours indoors a day is more than enough time where you may be vulnerable to picking up Covid.
Lockdown is the time when we have all spent the most time indoors. Itās also the time when Covid spread has decreased. But we are mostly in our little bubbles during lockdown, and societal interaction decreases, so the scope for spread is reduced. What increases the spread is indoor interaction among the population at large, interaction between different households or bubbles. That means pubs, schools, offices, cars, planes, buses, shops, everything in society that takes place indoors. When weāre not locked down, thatās when you have the extra layers of indoor interaction between people, on top of the indoor interaction that is unavoidable year round in our homes.
Neither am I convinced by the immunity argument. Sweden currently has the highest per capita case figures in Europe. If the immunity argument meant very much at all, they should have the lowest figures or at least close to the lowest.
I think it was probably wishful thinking that we could have been like Australia or New Zealand, but maybe we could have been like Norway or Finland, countries who have been relative success stories in a continent which taken as a whole has failed badly. But that would have been dependent on functioning public health teams, a discipline which has been treated as a joke in this country, and still is, even during the pandemic. To me the neglect of the find, test, trace, isolate system, and the fact that public health teams are under staffed, under resourced and often have to use pen and paper in the absence of a functioning IT system has been one of the biggest scandals in this country during the pandemic, and I donāt really see much political will to actually do anything about it.
Zero Covid as a whole is not going to happen now but elements of it like mandatory hotel quarantine will help us to some sort of an intermediate finish line at some point this summer where some of sort of normality will be phased in as vaccinations hit critical mass. After that, there will be a much longer slog to the real finish line of old normality and I donāt know when that second finish line will be because this is a world problem and the rest of the world is going to be way behind rich countries in terms of vaccinations. A return to quasi-normality this summer will be a leap of faith in and of itself.
I also fear that weāll hit some sort of a āwallā as regards vaccinations, it could be 60%, it could be 70 or 75% and thatās just adults, children will remain to be vaccinated.
The stench of this pandemic will last well beyond 2021, the threat of Covid as a scourge will last for years.
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im genuinely sorry to hear that. i hope you, and your family, are all doing well.
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I think what has become very apparent of the course of the pandemic is how much ego drives certain figures in the academic/medical world, the need to be seen to be right about everything even where somebody has been spectacularly wrong. I think it has been a cancer across the spectrum and even those who have got it more right than wrong have often been afflicted by this to an extent. Thatās why I trust people like Devi Sridhar, who arenāt afraid to admit that they have been mistaken about certain things, and who clearly arenāt treating this pandemic as an ideological culture war.
Ioannidis strikes me as somebody who has been driven way down that rabbit hole of ego, in an almost Ewan MacKenna style way. Dr. Farrell may consider Ioannidis as the greatest epidemiologist in the world ā an opinion he presents as fact ā but it seems obvious to me that personal ideology has overtaken Dr. Farrell in that view, I genuinely donāt know how he could arrive at that opinion without it being a personal, political ideological one.
Epidemiologists are there to try understand the dynamics of epidemics and pandemics, and to contribute to the body of knowledge that will end them. I fail to see how anybody could think Ioannisidis has contributed very much at all to the body of knowledge which we hope will end this particular pandemic. In fact it seems blatantly obvious to me he has been a major contributor to a largely political ideology which has helped to make it much worse and prolong it. That ideology has fed into conspiracy theorising about a load of different things, and led to people retreating almost into a world of fantasy where they almost believe the pandemic can be wished away. At the heart of such conspiracy theorising is fear. We have not experienced anything like this before, and some of us cannot come to terms with it, or come to terms with trying to comprehend its complexity, the elements of mystery attached to it. Some people get lost in the sheer impenetrable barrage of comment and anger and how it has turned into a culture war. Some people have a deep need for complexity to be done away with ā because it is scary - and grand overarching narratives, no matter how untrue, to take their place.
As regards Griptās continued desperate attempt to make an issue of those ISAG emails, itās pretty pathetic in my view. There was nothing paarticularly noteworthy or scandalous in any of them. The truth has always been scary, at every stage of this pandemic. But denying the truth has always been a lot, lot scarier.