Ireland drops most Covid restrictions in wake of 'Omicron storm'
reuters.com
reuters.com
So really, the 8pm curfew on hospitality has been lifted but that was always silly in the first place.
While you can point to some successes, the Irish government has really failed with their approach to all of this. The next election will be interesting and I predict Sinn Féin will be elected.
They’ve lifted the vax cert requirements for going out, limits on size of gatherings, and most mask requirements are due to go in a couple of weeks.
I’m pretty proud of our overall response as a nation, apart for the anti-mask loonies. Most of us did what was asked, and as a national policy we (mostly) followed the medical and scientific advice, with obvious compromises for economic, educational and social factors. And here we are now, having mostly gotten through it without massive loss of life, without overloading the hospitals (apart from unvaccinated towards the end) and we’re removing the restrictions.
Feels good.
Success should be measured by death tolls, happiness, and economic prosperity.
Curfew, masks while standing up and not when sitting down, cloth masks which data shows do nothing (from Bangladeshi RCT), etc.
With Omicron beating out Delta and not causing as many hospitalizations - sure, why not.
US hospitalizations are at an all time high, 2000 people are still dying every day, and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?
I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway.
2. There is a treatment protocol for COVID, unlike at the start of the pandemic.
3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity.
4. There is now a large portion of the population that has natural immunity.
5. It should be abundantly clear that case counts is no longer a meaningful metric.
6. Covid is a disease that has markedly different effects based upon the host’s age, medical condition, etc. There is no equivalent level of risk.
7. Most of the population, think working class and kids, cannot sustain continued lockdown conditions without serious mental/economic effects. They don’t have the privilege of the laptop class to just dial in from an office.
8. It should be clear that universally containing an aerosol virus like COVID is impossible. What is possible is targeted containment, I.e. keeping nursing homes under more precautions.
Re hospital capacity, Hospitals run close to their limit. I have been in and out of the medical system my whole life and can assure that delays, cancellations, etc are nothing new. Is there strain during the new waves? Of course. But these are waves and they will come and pass. As well perhaps firing unvaccinated nurses wasn’t a good idea? People can choose to isolate during the waves if they want, but if they feel they feel like they have no need to (vaccine immunity, natural immunity). And as a father of small children, I cannot in good conscience continue to deny them a childhood for a virus that they themselves have extremely little risk of. The human brain is only developing during its childhood years once.
I used to do work for the Democratic party many years ago. It was sort of a given back in 2014 that we were going to get the vast majority of Latino votes going into the future. These unsustainable policies have caused Latinos to shift dramatically away from the Democratic party. It is politically unsustainable and destructive. It is politically, unsustainable and destructive.
Regarding the unvaccinated nurses getting fired, should be noted that virtually all of them had natural immunity. My sister-in-law is one of these who did not want to get vaccinated because she had already contracted the virus and had attended several patients suffering from adverse events as well as friends who had their menstrual cycles disrupted. There was no scientific harm from this decision because her natural immunity was more protective than the vaccine based on multiple studies, including a CDC study that was just released last week.
Your comment on being a father is also 100% correct. People seem to think that children's brains continue to develop at the same rate between the ages of five and eight as they do between the ages of 3 and 5. That's just not how it works. You have these tiny windows of time where the brain is going through rapid development and you can't make up for these windows in a later time period.
History will likely not be kind to the policies against children that were pursued to protect unionized teachers and elderly people who will long be dead when the repercussions of this horrible policy towards children are fully felt. But perhaps I have too much faith in the people writing the history to be honest, considering that the laptop class are the most powerful and the most paranoid and frightened.
China has done it for pre-omicron variants, so it is possible. You and I are not willing to accept the restrictions necessary to do it and that's fine, but you cannot say it is impossible.
In January of 2020, a Chinese born coworker of mine who is now a citizen had her father die in Beijing. Every symptom of how he died was obviously COVID, but the authorities officially classified his death as cardiac arrest. She was enraged by this but that was the common thread in Beijing.
Sure. It's an anecdote but it's not like you can get any real data about this. Who is going to collect it when the entire nation state is turned against you?
It's interesting to watch how this thread changed once people on the West Coast woke up. The branch covidians are in full force.
Yeeeeesss. The vaccines are beneficial in preventing serious illness but it's important not to overstate their efficacy.
As I write this I have COVID, which I caught from my girlfriend. We're not sure where she got it, but she started showing symptoms and tested positive last Saturday. I started showing symptoms on Monday but didn't test positive until Wednesday.
We're both double vaxxed and boosted. In my case I had 2 x AZ and 1 x Moderna. Can't remember off the top of my head what she had. Both of us are in good health. Neither of us have underlying health conditions.
She's fortunately started feeling a lot better now but I've really only just passed rock bottom. I feel much better than yesterday but still far from well. The internet is full of stories of people who were all, "I had COVID: it lasted 4 days and was no big deal," and then a week later are either in ICU or dead, so I'm not taking anything for granted. Seeming to get better and then getting rapidly worse, or having it linger on for a surprisingly long time, is something of a hallmark of COVID. (Of course, there are also plenty of people for whom it really is no big deal.)
Probably I won't become seriously ill or die, but COVID is no picnic, and if you had the choice of getting it versus not getting it I'd advise against it. Even with Omicron, if a large enough proportion of the population were infected at one time, our healthcare systems would collapse under the pressure. Whilst I don't like to credit the current UK government with terribly much intelligence, our experience in this country has been that it has required some degree of careful management to avoid that scenario playing out. Even still, our death rate is high compared with many other nations.
There's also the fact that the picture is very different across different countries: for example, the situation in Ireland is very different to the UK.
TO BE CLEAR: Unless you have a very clear and specific medical reason not to, you should get vaccinated, but let's not pretend the vaccines are a panacea. That's misinformation as much as it is to state that they're completely unnecessary, that COVID is some sort of elaborate hoax, or - and I don't have enough faces or palms to adequately express my despair at this perspective - that they're some sort of government conspiracy to track us all with nanobots.
How do you know that? My question, really, is how do you know what you know and are not being misled? (A la WMD to use an easy, universally understood, example?)
“2000 people are still dying every day,”
No, they’re not. According to the CDC (why do I trust them?) its currently 500/day [1]. It hasn't been > 2000 since September in the midst of the Delta spike. But even before I looked at the CDC I doubted your claim because:
- The vast majority of adult Americans are vaccinated. (>70%?). Its far greater in the vulnerable population.
- Of the unvaxxed, a great number of them are already recovered (or dead)
- You agree, this leaves a significantly reduced pool of people for the Grim Reaper to harvest.
Therefore, 2000 dead/day in January 2022 would have been far far worse than the all time high of 25 000/ week (>3000/day) we reached in Jan last year because the normalizing population was much higher then.
For your figure to be correct then, omicron would have to be, not just more contagious (it is), but a spectacularly more deadly variant than Delta instead of being relatively benign.
“and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?”
We’re not OK with it, we’ve made peace and learned to live with something that has become endemic and will never go away.
2 years of pandemic implies 1/40th of an average lifespan. Thats not insignificant. But it gets worse
2 years is 66% of my toddler’s life. A toddler that doesnt know what a peer’s smile is since she’s masked all day.
2 years is 33% of my first grader’s life. Who luckily avoided any long term school closures, but goes crazy whenever there’s a two week “virtual learning” session.
What happened is, therefore, that peoples lives cannot be put on hold indefinitely. There are worse fates than death [2]. We have the tools and knowledge to deal with COVID and we want to return to normal.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
[2] ironically, a person who doesn't understand that doesn't have much to live for.
In early summer 2020, my mom passed in hospice from cancer. 4mo before that she had a fighting chance, but faced intensive surgeries (ICU for sure based on experience) and chemo — all in isolation. Literally the hospital made it that choice - family has to leave. They basically gaslighted her out.
I was furious, and because the hospital was not overwhelmed. there were precautions obviously, but no - it was not filled with Covid or people dying from Covid. Utter bs.
The pervasiveness of dying or suffering alone has exploded in the last two years. It is one of the worst fates.
Hopefully, this pandemic will have served to shock us to take better care of our seniors who have been neglected for too long.
What's the point of concluding with such a cynical and subjective-at-best remark?
What is worth living for that isnt also worth dying for?
My wife and I in May of 2020 decided that a hug from our grandchildren and children was worth way more the minimal risk we had of dying from Covid should we have caught it. We ended our exile in May day and decided to let fate be fate and not let fear consume us and prevent us from enjoying our family.
I don’t begrudge others for their own decisions, but for me, the pandemic ended for me mentally on Mothers Day 2020. Time with my family is worth dying for…so if I catch it and it kills me, so be it.
On a more serious note, I may be misunderstanding the nuance of what you are saying/asking, but for me there is relatively little overlap between "things worth living for" and "things worth dying for". A few people in my life, that's it. There are plenty of things to live for. Seeing technology advance, traveling, experiencing things, meeting people, creating something of value and/or meaning, having a positive impact. Ultimately, none of those are things worth dying for. I'd rather not have them, than not have them and be dead.
Provisional death counts may not match counts from other sources, such as media reports or numbers from county health departments. Counts by NCHS often track 1–2 weeks behind other data."
Your source itself says that it does not yet have complete data for January 2022.
It's a bit rich to go on about being misled by mysterious forces and trusting the CDC and so on and then "do your own research" and fail to understand the basic reporting methodology of the source you land on.
How would you (or really anyone I suppose) evaluate whether to trust the CDC or some other equivalent?
Also, thanks for those numbers. I don't know why that breakdown isn't more widely pushed.
- Do the numbers add up? Fake numbers often don't.
- Does the narrative have a logical flow? Lies often break apart (careful! Consipracy theories are often very consistent)
- Aethetics. Lies are often repulsive to our soul (Nazism, socialism -> see nihlism). Careful again; sometimes its “the ugly truth”
- Dialectic (for lack of a better word. Not Hegel’s type. Whatever that was). Engage and hear out someone who disagrees
- Meditate. Close your eyes and release. And overlooked Truth might pop up.
- Look around you. Does the narrative fit your observed reality? Careful! There’s observational bias.
Keep tabs of who has the courage to defend positions they disagree with.
Keep tabs of those who reveal themselves sycophants
No one cares until it affects them.
As bad as US health care system is (and it is bad), it is ridiculously over capitalized. Compared with Canada, the US normally has 50% more ICU beds. More Dr. per capita (slightly) and a ridiculous larger number of nurses and secretaries.
Therefore, Ontario’s health care system gets overwhelmed during bad flu seasons.
In this scenario, Ontario’s recent lockdowns make (material) sense, but that doesnt mean that significant health care resources are being diverted in the US.
By over capitalized, I mean the US has insane medical facilities everywhere people live. I live within a 5 minute drive of three major hospitals, and who knowns how many minor medical centers
EDIT:
Please dont take this to be a judgement on Ontario’s health system. Before COVID both my parents were successfully treated in Ontario for cancer, for which Im grateful.
My comment is merely an illustrative example of how differences health care systems do and must affect government response
While many don't care until it affects them, that is not even close to universally true.
I was surprised at the number of people who didn't care, and it seems to be about 50%, but characterizing everyone that way is incredibly unfair to all the people who worked tirelessly to try to convince people to get the vaccine.
If the self righteous cared about peoples lives instead of pushing people with relatively lower risk to get a vaccine they would have sent those vaccines to the third world to vaccinate the vulnerable there.
Instead the WHO complained in early 2021 that we gave our vulnerable a double dose
In the summer of 2021 WHO complained when we vaccinating our healthy young
In the fall of 2021, the WHO was shocked when we rolled out boosters
By now, the WHO has given up complaining about booster boosters. Instead its become evident that the people working relentlessly to vaccinate everyone are driven by fear of, not concern for, their neighbor
> By now, the WHO has given up complaining about booster boosters. Instead its become evident that the people working relentlessly to vaccinate everyone are driven by fear of, not concern for, their neighbor
Or both.
Omicron is being called 'mild', but it's not mild for a lot of people in absolute terms (even though it may be milder compared to what earlier variants might have been for that individual).
If you are at risk of dying from covid and you didn't get vaccinated it is kinda your fault now. And if you are vaccinated and dying from covid, well there is not much more you could have done.
Full vaccination is at about 65%, boosters are at about 25%, lower than much of Europe.
Percent of US Population
At least Fully
one dose Vaxed Boosted
Total 75.4% 63.3% 39.5%
Population ≥ 5 Years of Age 80.1% 67.3%
Population ≥ 12 Years of Age 85.3% 72.1%
Population ≥ 18 Years of Age 87.3% 73.8% 42.6%
Population ≥ 65 Years of Age 95% 88.2% 62.7%
It's reasonable to be measuring against eligibility when evaluating progress in administering boosters, but not being eligible for a booster doesn't really make someone less susceptible to infection, so it isn't the right thing to compare across countries.
One year, not two.
There was never any hope of containing COVID. It was endemic by the end of 2019. Individual countries had a chance of avoiding it with border controls that no Western country has the political will to implement - but the will to implement an indefinite policy of sakoku no longer exists anywhere. Since COVID was globally endemic before official sources even acknowledged human-to-human transmission, there was never any hope of not taking the bullet eventually - although in theory "eventually" means "until the next Commodore Perry".
A reasonable strategy would be to slow the spread of the virus to study vaccines, treatment protocols, and the possibility of long-term sequelae, and to build medical capacity, and then, at some point, declare good-enough preliminary results and (modulo medical capacity concerns) let it rip. Letting it rip while there are still such vast unknown unknowns is irresponsible and only potentially justifiable in hindsight - Anders Tegnell looks good now, but it could've been a lot worse.
But the propaganda machine can't turn on a dime, so the measures lasted much longer than they had any reason to, at least in the parts of the "Free World" that believe in respecting established authority qua established authority.
Well, about that. A few governors have admitted what has been known by “conspiracy theorists” for the past two years: that included in the count of Covid hospitalizations are people who come to the hospital for something else entirely and happen to test positive [0]:
> Officials from New York City-based NYU Langone Health told The New York Times in a Jan. 4 report that about 65 percent of its COVID-19 patients were "incidentally" found to be infected after admission for other reasons. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul asked hospitals to adjust their reporting on COVID-19 hospitalizations beginning Jan. 4 to make the distinction between those admitted for the virus as their primary condition and those who incidentally test positive.
...
> "We have a few patients in the hospital for COVID, but not many, thank goodness," Dr. Jha tweeted. "More common on our service is folks admitted with COVID. That is, they came to the hospital for something else and found to have COVID."
So the count numbers have been exaggerated for who knows how long. An accident, I’m sure.
0: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcome...
To top it off, healthy unvaccinated nurses can't work, but capacity is so low some hospitals are asking covid positive nurses to come back to work before they fully recover or had the full quarantine period.
Also, it's entirely up to people themselves if they want to be protected or not: Omicron is so transmissive, it doesn't matter for transmission if people are vaccinated or not - whatever impact it has on transmission is of little consequence - everyone is going to get infected, anyway (maybe a few weeks later but it doesn't matter at all).
On the other hand, vaccines are universally available, and free, for a very long time now.
Together it means that if you are unvaccinated, it's on one hand, only your own fault, and on the other hand, only your problem - effectively you no longer endanger anyone but yourself by staying unvaccinated (big difference from what it was a year ago).
Which means, there is no point for anyone but unvaccinated themselves suffering. If you got the vaccine, Omicron is about as dangerous as flu, and no one closes economy because of flu.
Almost all unvaccinated are Republicans and Democratic administration is in power...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
Imo the only thing that really matters is the hospitalization rate of the vaccinated. If it's near bad flu numbers, then there's no more concern
However, even though I'm fully vaccinated and boosted so personally have no reason to fear COVID from the point of view of landing in the hospital or dying directly from COVID (and all my friends and family are in a similar position) it is still an indirect concern because the unvaccinated are taking up hospital resources that I might need.
Even in my county in the US, which has been in the bottom quarter for case, death, and hospitalization rates in my state, which has been in the bottom 5-10 states for all of those statistics for the entire pandemic, there are enough unvaccinated people in the hospital now with COVID that hospitals are almost unable to take new patients. Omicron looks like it is peaking here, so it will probably be OK to go ahead and have my heart attack or get hit by a drunk driver without worrying about whether I'll be able to get treatment, but there are a heck of a lot of places in the US right now where this is not the case.
The good news is that after omicron, enough of the unvaccinated will have some immunity via omicron that it should bring their hospitalization rates down enough that it is no longer a problem. That's when we reach the "it can be treated like a a cold or flu from a public health perspective" stage. A recent NTY covid briefing email looked at the data from places that are ahead of the US on the omicron curve, and that's what they concluded.
The solution to this is to bump the unvaccinated to the lowest priority of hospitals. If beds are full they should be removed from the hospital.
So no, even if those ethical questions would be resolved in favor of it, it is at best a solution during a future pandemic. It is not one for this pandemic.
If you disagree with this statement, then here's hard proof: See page 7 of this UK report (latest data) tracking the vaccination status of Covid hospitalizations and deaths: https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/sites/default/files/publication...
I've actually had a look at the document you pointed. It's very confusing. The last line of the report at page 7 states:
Rates of hospital admissions in the time range (8/nov - 5/dec):
- fully vaccinated: 493
- partially vaccinated + unvaccinated: 267
Rate per 100k admitted to hospital, same time range:
- fully vaccinated: 39
- partially vaccinated + unvaccinated: 208
I'm not sure how to reconcile the numbers above. Page 8 is a graph plotting the second metric (rate per 100k).
Most people in the hospitals for Covid are vaccinated.
And I'm sorry, I thought this was a thread about Ireland?
The data on page 7 also shows hospitalization is overwhelmingly for populations aged 60+ and up. Which is unfortunate, but I think people, parents especially, are having to decide between tradeoffs of prioritizing elderly versus benefits kids get from ending restrictions.
Myself and my family all have the boosters. As long as transmission is high and masks are recommended we will wear masks. Other than that though, my preference would be that there are few other restrictions in place. What I am tired of is waiting for everyone else to get the vaccine and wear a mask. At this point it seems like a lost cause and not worth my effort to spend energy on.
I still have a lot of sympathy for healthcare workers and really anyone else that has to work in a highly public setting where they are at higher risk of exposure.
After two years and now 4 shots being discussed it’s clearly apparent:1) people will still get infected, 2) despite the lower risk of death with vaccines, plenty will still die, 3) we can’t keep borrowing money and giving to people when we shutdown their businesses.
And I feel like the protests in Australia, Canada, US, Europe are making it pretty clear people aren’t willing to make major sacrifices for another year, or two or three.
Far smarter to pretend this was the plan all along then watch people blatantly disregard your rules.
Clearly at some point, we’re going to end the pandemic-related restrictions, right? It seems a valid question to ask periodically “is now the right time to stop doing X?” Whatever X is and whether or not you think X is effective vs X’s downsides are all factors into your answer, but factors that shouldn’t preclude asking the question.
There are going to be a range of people’s answers from “YOLO!” to “but think of the children/grandma!” Society (with government as the instrument) would do well to decide based on the science and stats, not on what the extremists on either end would prefer.
At some point, we’re going to stop wasting everyone’s years all together, but that’s inevitably going to take all the years away from (kill) at least one person who would have survived if we’d stayed locked down. It’s a living Trolley Problem.
Some haven’t and are paying the consequences.
For US probably a couple more waves and it’ll go through the unvaccinated.
If we didn’t have vaccines how much larger would the numbers be?
"90% of the people in this hospital for COVID today are unvaccinated" is a very different statement when, for hypothetical examples,
- 90% of the people in the local area area are unvaccinated: Hospital population is same as general population.
- 10% of the people in the local area area are unvaccinated: Hospital population is mostly drawn from the unvaccinated.
And points in-between, and the other way (what if - for sake of example only - 95% of local people are unvaccinated?).
And then there are further confounding effects - what if unvaccinated people are younger and than average, as vaccines are given preferentially to older people who are more likely to require a hospital visit in normal times.
Virginia, highest wave peak recorded, including ICU and ventilations: https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/see-the-numbers/cov...
New York, second highest wave peak and highest new admissions per day: https://coronavirus.health.ny.gov/daily-hospitalization-summ...
The problem is and always has been "what if the health care system is overwhelmed".
With that reasoning you can never remove the restrictions, because you never know if that would overwhelm the health care system.
I just sat at home with no sense of smell or taste for 2 weeks.
People during this whole pandemic have been very cavalier with putting others at risk to not get inconvenienced. “Your kid probably won’t die” is not a winning argument.
Or you’re too young for the vaccine.
Hospitalizations among 0-1 year olds are significantly up with Omicron. Even 1-14 year olds represent a sizable portion of hospitalizations in many states, presumably biased toward those in that age group too young for the vaccine.
Being a parent of young children is not great right now as Omicron gets worse for children and everyone else in the world seems to have given up on helping you reduce your risk of your young kids catching it.
Sure, it sucks, but there are a lot of diseases out there that can put your child in the hospital that we’re not imposing restrictions for.
So it’s a little frustrating to hear people talk like this when not everyone can get vaccinated yet.
My kids are 2 and 5 - they've both had Covid at least once, possibly twice and it was indistinguishable from all the other colds they've had since the pandemic hit.
[0] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nati...
We're trying to balance multiple factors: living our life normally, protecting ourselves, protecting family members we still interact with. We take some known risks: sending child to preschool, while taking known precautions: wearing masks, getting vaccinated. If being vaccinated reduces the chance that we might spread the virus to someone, then that's a marginal advantage we'll stack in our favor.
If in fact vaccination reduces transmission of the virus, then that's an advantage I'll stack in our favor, among other precautions like wearing masks.
If yes, then the chance of them dying is relatively low.
I am not saying one is right or wrong, but I think it is valid to look at all the other viral infections kids are exposed to and cannot be vaccinated against, and realize they just have to roll the dice. In the past 4 years, my kids have had RSV, a noro or rotavirus, probably Covid at least once, and a numerous other viruses.
RSV/noro were the worst, but if they are going to play with other kids, it is all but guaranteed they will have something. I am actually most afraid of noro/rota viruses, far more than Covid. That thing tore through the entire daycare and shutdown multiple classes within 2 days, and the cleanup from all the vomit was crazy.
Omicron has a higher propensity to infect the upper respiratory tract, which is less developed in young children.
You need to forget what you’ve heard about older variants and children. Look at the stats. More kids are being hospitalized in this wave and more deaths are occurring per capita in 0-14 year olds.
It’s not good.
Citation please? Current CDC data don’t show enough deaths in that age range to be statistically significant, let alone provide that conclusion.
Statistics mean nothing once something bad has happened to you. It's not like having been struck by lightning is less bad because the odds of happening to you were low. I will do what I can to stack the odds in our favor.
Lot's of people are ignoring the mask mandates and going with out a mask, even on the public transportation.
I'm triple vaxxed and had covid in December. I'm going to nightclubs, pubs, restaurants etc. because why not? Who knows what the next variants etc will bring, but really does feel like Omicron is a gift of some sort.
The cute cloth masks and disposable paper ones simply aren't going to make a difference in an enclosed space like a bus or subway. It is the worst kind of security theater, in that it makes people feel safer when they are not, and so more willing to take risks than they would have been otherwise.
Asking people to wear cloth masks on PT during covid is like asking them to wear a bandana while riding a bicycle.
This might be helpful for your situation
In this wave, case:hospitalisation ratio about 1:80. Last year it was about 1:13
I hope for thorough consideration of the totality of the evidence by voters and some careful thought regarding the last two years.
The moderation here is less than encouraging.
1. What's the horrifying precedent? 2. Assuming we can another pandemic one day which is more severe, how would you handle restrictions to protect public health - assuming you would at all?
(I think a lot of the debate around Covid stems from the unfortunate fact that it's too severe to ignore but not severe enough to get everyone on the same page. I can respect "we didn't need to this time" but I'm curious about people who argue "we should never do this")
Stipulate that the current crop of names all have noble intent. Not taking swipes at anyone in view.
You've no guarantees of such going forward.
The current situation is Checkov's Gun[1]. At some point, if we don't enjoy a collective think on where this is going, there will be dismay.
Also capacity has been increasing year on year for the past 100 years in the EU, USA and the UK . Faster than population actually.
Also there is cyclical and situational capacity management. For e.g.: flu waves, new year and now covid waves.
I only know about those regions
As a policy to stop groups getting COVID, it seems it encouraged the thing it was trying to prevent.
Anyway, kudos to them for going back to something like normalcy, I must go back there on vacation!
Also the pubs had limits on number of people to a table, table service only etc.
On the other hand a lot of people just didn't bother going out due to the early closing time. For a lot of people going out earlier wasn't an option.
So hard to say if it was a net reduction or increase in risk.
I am not claiming that your statement is wrong, just that the causal relationship is not at all clear to me. It is probably much easier to show for vax rates, but lockdowns -- I have not seen a convincing proof.
I can understand a quick reaction for a week or two as we plan a strategy; maybe for a month. But two years is ridiculous. This seems to be driven by politics more than health. Which seems to be agreed to by most people in many countries who largely ignore it (except for countries like Australia and NZ, which imposed real, hard lockdowns). In the Eastern Europe in the summer where masks were required inside, most people wear them on the chin (even at the airports). And say "cannot wait when those jerks from the EU stop pushing those rules down our throats".
And last but not least: I know well two people who are immunocompromised. Their care took a definite turn for the worse, because in many countries there is at the moment a single disease worth fighting and everything non-COVID becomes a distant second. Whew. That turned into a rant. Sorry!
Canada being sparse is a bit misleading. While yes, it's a very large country with relatively few people, 90+% of people live within 150 km of the US border, and the population density in major population centres (Toronto / Vancouver / Montreal) is comparable to US metro areas.
Vaccination rates you're correct, but the lower impact of COVID was observed pre-vaccination as well.
General health is a good point though, I'm sure it's a factor - I don't know if it explains such a large difference in death rate though.
I'd hestitate to draw conclusions by comparing countries, there is not enough data.
If we could compare different local areas that had different policies, we might be able to get somewhere. Even then, it's not easy. The locales who are happy to lockdown are probably also composed of people happy to wear a mask and happy to vaccinate. There is also an ugly reverse causality thing going on where lockdowns are a response to growing community spread, which makes it look like they don't work when maybe they actually do.
It's not an easy question to answer empirically. I'm happy to do the finger in the air approach of assuming they work based on common sense. That doesn't mean that they should be implemented, which is a related but different question.
Can you show where they said this? This is what will happen but I haven't heard it be stated as a official strategy.
Refreshing to see tha even at the govt level, there is competition of ideas.
The economic consequences are still being recognized. Drive around the prime tourist areas and all the storefronts are empty. Factory workers are going back to their small towns and waiting it out, so factories can’t find workers. Western companies are canceling orders, etc.
They are learning you can’t turn chunks of the economy on/off. Every change of rules mean investors and customers eventually just “sit and wait it out”. Plus the cost of restarting factories, bringing tourism back, etc isn’t small, so when countries go back and forth the smart move is to just sit back and wait.
Look at the EU . We should be glad that bureaucratic nightmare (created with good intentions, all should be said) hasn't led to war just yet.
For much of January they've had 0.4-0.5% of their population test positive per day, with 40-50% test positivity, meaning the real infections could have been 1-2% of their population per day. Very high rates of vaccines, very high rates of booster and absurdly high rates of infections means that there may not be anything left for the virus to do.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Next, consider Ireland is practically Dublin as capitol and single large city, and a more rural less dense populated rest of the country. Again, no template or match to other countries. It might work for Ireland.
My comment was not meant to express any valuation or disvaluation of Ireland. It’s focus is about differences in age structures, population density, and vaccination strategy / execution, which makes it difficult to take Irelands approach as template for any other country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_settlements_on_the_isl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Germany_by_p...
1. Governments have decided that by now if you're not vaccinated it's by choice (which it is, barring actual medical conditions) it's by choice and the governments (as well as many people) have stopped caring;
2. The CDC's recent self-isolation has shown that given (1), the government cares more about keeping the economy going or has decided everyone is going to get Omicron anyway or both; and
3. The government has decided (and probably modeled) that hospitals might strain under the load but won't collapse as was a much bigger risk 1-2 years ago.
The statistics are pretty stark on this. In the US 2000+ people still die of Covid every day, 90-95% of those are unvaccinated and it feels like the government and people in general have lost patience with people who at this point are simply choosing to die.
It's dumb, corny, and not that funny, but it helps me appropriately pity them instead of being angry at them. Isolation can foster a negative feedback loop of excessive media consumption, and the media is filled with quantitatively illiterate mid-wits who grossly exaggerated the risk for healthy, non elderly people. Fear is the mind killer indeed.
In any case, this experiment will inform other countries on how to proceed further. I sincerely hope the results will be good, both for Ireland and the rest of the world.
If you want to follow the Covid data for Ireland, here’s the official site:
It's having very little impact on our hospitalization rates, despite massive jumps in overall case numbers. The main aim of the restrictions was to prevent the health service from becoming overrun (especially over christmas when they were already strained), and it's been deemed no longer necessary.
It's still not understood what pressures led to Omicron favouring lower lethality so I'll be curious if that's ever explained over the normal "that's what viruses do _shrug_"...
Which leads to the question why should Omicron have become so less lethal if this is just the 4th strain with <100 mutations?
I don't think you have a good grasp of the basics of the mechanics of evolutionary selection, epidemiology or whatever. Maybe spend some time brushing up on the basics of the science before starting speculation on the why's and wherefore - stuff that appears suspicious to you now is actually a logical result of natural processes
Another one, politicians need to stop using science for propaganda. The mistrust in scientists has cost us dearly.
Like we have massive infrastructure in place to prevent diseases like cholera from being a problem. We should do more to mitigate airborne transmission.
If I have a heart attack or car accident tomorrow, I’m at serious risk of not getting a bed and treatment.
If the anti-vac morons weren’t taking up so much space at the hospitals, I’d agree. But with numbers the way they are, “return to normal” is a pipe dream.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2021/08/08/joe-rog...
The unvaccinated at risk have had their chance to get vaccinated. If they get sick and end up in the hospital it will only be their fault.
It's also many times less pathogenic than Delta, and it's a gift that nothing at present can outcompete it. I believe it's the version that will be endemic, if not than something very similar. So as someone who has spent too many months raging against people who refused to look at the facts of Delta - my mom missed essential surgery because the ICUs were crowded with antivax people, to add emotion to the mix - I'm onside that it's the time to start opening up, at least in jurisdictions where Omicron is 95%+ of cases and where hospitalizations have peaked.
The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along. Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days.
edit: In the above I say I believe all of us will be exposed - not necessarily infected though.
Which doesn’t mean we all have to get it at the same time.
I’m so tired of these false dichotomies. There’s a lot of middle ground between full lockdown and completely giving up so everyone gets it at the same time. We’re already running out of ICU beds and emergency treatments like monoclonal antibodies where I’m at.
Yet the prevailing logic seems to be that because masks and distancing aren’t perfectly effective that we should just give up and go full-on into infections for everybody.
Once hospitalizations are in decline most of the population will have been exposed.
It's not that simple. It's not a matter of doing something good vs not doing it, that's what an oversimplified black and white thinking is. It's about priorities, and about looking at certain types of damage compared to other types of damage, and choosing the best path that causes the least overall damage.
The case peak from omicron was 7x the delta numbers, hospitalization numbers were 2x, and icu was actually down.
I feel like omicron has burned through here, and there’s not a huge risk to opening at this point.
At the point when we have another infectious strain going around, they’re going to have to reevaluate, but that’s later.
I dont think all or even most of people who use those is truly confused and dont understand. Instead, allowing anything else then "if not 100% miracle it dont work" would force them to admit they are wrong or politicians they root for are wront.
It is much easier to beat the other side in argument if you pretend you are too simple to understand percentages and shades. Because contemporary culture treats nuance as weakness and pretty much accepts that kind of argument.
If anything, attacking anything that hints of "maybe we should reassess given current data" as being the same as the antimask/antivax rhetoric of the last two years is itself exactly what you are criticising.
It's a pity, but no, it's not the same as antimask/antivax rhetoric.
Pretending that all those people don't understand does not help anything. Which is why I made that point.
It is repeated patten from the start of pandemic. If something is not 100% perfect, there is not point on doing it and anyone doing it is stupid sheep. No matter how full hospitals are, you are stupid sheep for doing small things that take chances down (like getting vaccine). Pretending that massive powerful media machine broadcasting these are just confused serves no one.
The same applies to people who assume that unvaccinated people must be idiots.
Alternatively, many who were caught in the flood washed up safely on the shores, returned back to town to see people ripping down their houses to build barriers against the flood that they thought was the end of the world.
But by your reckoning it's not many, and given Hitler killed 6 million Jews, which is a lot less than 78 million, he didn't kill that many either.
It's an enormous loss of life, but a tiny number for a worldwide pandemic, especially given current travel technologies that would have made ancient plagues orders of magnitude worse than they were.
In comparison, we're talking about the targeted, deliberate, highly organized extermination of two thirds the entire Jewish race in Europe.
It is another fact that excess mortality has been shown, clearly and repeatedly.
It is also a fact that there is a theory in psychology that anger stems from fear.
This is a misleading way to say your risk of hospitalization is about half of what it was with Delta.
Vaccination is making it safer to get closer back to normal — which is why Ireland can consider it with their much higher rate of over 92% versus the U.S. 63% — but we still need to be thinking about masks and improved ventilation when it’s spreading, especially since kids are still unable to be vaccinated.
2. Reducing R flattens the curve, and pushing it below 1.0 ends the pandemic.
> vaccines have been shown to make anything else than a dent in the levels of infections
Oh?
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2022011...
This applies to all ages, but if I had linked to an ICU with adults I'm sure you would have blamed the pattern on old people.
Vaccines make a big difference, it's just that the vaccine doesn't protect people who don't take it. Even so, it kinda does: herd immunity and R are real. It's hilarious that anti-vaxxers seem to think that anything less than the vaccine somehow managing to protect 100% of people who don't take it is some kind of failure on its part.
I have two children and they are not getting any COVID vaccine unless a second generation one that is not experimental is developed. I don't want any shot developed during the Trump administration in a rushed federal program injected into my kids and you shouldn't either. They've already both caught the virus and had no symptoms whatsoever. We wouldn't have even known they had it if not for the fact that I had lost my sense of smell and got tested.
Children are at lower risk from COVID-19 than they are from influenza. That is the data and it might not agree with your priors but it doesn't change the fact that that is the data.
It should be noted that the second generation of the COVID vaccine is going to look nothing like the first. They are likely not going to use the same components of the virus that they did with the first generation because the spike protein payload has unintended consequences in some human beings. I acknowledge that this subgroup of human beings is a small minority but it happened to include my mother-in-law who is now dead after suffering cardiac arrest 4 hours after her second shot.
In case you think I am a nutty anti-vaxxer I assure you I am not. I firmly believe that my father is alive today because of the vaccine. He was in a high-risk category and I just don't believe he would have survived COVID infection if he had caught it. It's a great idea for people like him and people in his age group. Hell, it was a good idea for my mother-in-law, but unintended consequences are going to happen when you have a practically untested vaccine administered to a massive population. Both of them are at high risk from the virus. My children are simply not. People seem to be unwilling to admit that a vaccine developed for a rapidly evolving virus in 2020 isn't very effective in 2022. I don't know why this cognitive dissonance is so strong, but it's just the fact. It prevents hospitalization but not spread. That's a good thing, but it's a private health effect, not a public one.
"small" is doing a lot of work here. As a society, we are generally comfortable with mandates that contain a small amount of risk. This had better be a large value of "small."
> Among more than 2.5 million vaccinated HCO members who were 16 years of age or older, 54 cases met the criteria for myocarditis. The estimated incidence per 100,000 persons who had received at least one dose of vaccine was 2.13 cases (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.56 to 2.70). The highest incidence of myocarditis (10.69 cases per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 6.93 to 14.46) was reported in male patients between the ages of 16 and 29 years. A total of 76% of cases of myocarditis were described as mild and 22% as intermediate; 1 case was associated with cardiogenic shock.
Oh, it isn't. It's tiny. How many thousands of people do you have to stack on the railroad before you pull the switch on the trolley problem? Not this many. Not a hardship.
The other thing to remember is that kids don’t have a problem with the extremely mild inconvenience of wearing a mask — that’s mostly adults complaining for political reasons. If you ask a teacher, it’s just something they do like wearing shoes, and vaccination is no different than all of the other ones they get (95% rate in the US prior to Republicans choosing to politicize medicine).
This should all be indexed to vaccination and spread rates: relax restrictions on high risk activities like indoor dining as the former climbs and the latter declines, and prioritize keeping schools safe to avoid disruptive closures.
All care should have focused on the elderly (early treatment, access to doctors even when positive...). No restrictions (mask, mandatory vaccine, lockdowns..) makes sense for those aged under 45yo.
Not necessarily 'long covid' stuff, just the basic injury that comes from the illness. I sure don't want to lose my sense of smell.
Even in young children, the consequences of infection appear to be worse statistically than the consequences of vaccination. It's of course not all that well understood yet, but for example, compare this syndrome that appears to be associated with Covid infection to the myocarditis due to vaccination:
https://www.cdc.gov/mis/mis-c.html
If you look at what pediatricians and epidemiologists with children are doing, they are being pretty cautious and are eager to vaccinate them.
What? This is completely, wildly,untrue. See for starters Spanish Flu (killed mostly those aged under 45), smallpox (disproportionately affecting children)
For the stated and proven reasons, the commonly known basis of vaccination: 1: It is much, much, much more dangerous to get COVID than the vaccine. 2: The immune response from vaccination is much more protective and much more consistent than the immune response from infection, especially with this disease.
This is known.
Also, established scientific knowledge lies counter to the statements you have as premise.
Source? I think you are mis aggregating data.
92% [1] of Ireland Adult population has received it-least 1 dose vs 85% [2] of the US Adult population has received it-least 1 dose.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58522792 [2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/who-are-the-a...
Here's the one I used, which shows full vaccination on 91.7% and partial at 93%:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-trac...
Others have it around 80% so that's probably in error:
https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgis.com/pages/vaccinat... https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=IRL https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
Well, there has been at least some change. While in the beginning, those people negated the existence of covid alltogether. Only after many of them did in fact suffer from the real virus, I heard those stories less and less and rather now many recommendation of chlordioxid and ivermectin. (Without ever hearing anything about being wrong for once)
In other words, those people rather take something, that is usually used for desinfection and bathroom cleaning - instead of the vaccination. You cannot reason with that.
That being said, I can very much understand, being sceptical of a brand new proprietary genetic technology to be injected in my system.
But I cannot understand completely misstrusting worldwide efforts of so many people - and then rather trust someone on the internet. So, why care, what they think? They can be wrong a million times and you can proof it and they can ignore the facts, a million times more.
If it required a Herculean effort to prevent the health care system collapsing, why didn't Sweden's healthcare system collapse? Why didn't Florida's health care system collapse? There's this certainty that these policies that were more restrictive were absolutely necessary, but nobody wants to acknowledge that locations on the planet that did not have strict policies seem to have done just as well over two years. I welcome you to look at the Swedish data and compare it to the rest of the EU or the United States. Sweden did very well compared to other nations with large global cities. It did not do great compared to Finland, but that's like comparing Colorado to Nebraska. They are neighboring but nothing alike.
I was very pro mask in the beginning until I realized that it was quickly turning into a cultish religion with no regard for actual efficacy. People didn't care that you were wearing a bandana on your mouth that was absolutely not effective, they just wanted you to signal to them that you agreed with their beliefs. My kids being forced to wear masks while playing sports outside on a field was utterly absurd and I have deep resentment towards public health authorities and the cultists who allowed their fear to hijack their brains and their common sense.
Your statement shows a confidence in your own prior beliefs with a muted acceptance of the new reality with omicron. But you just assume that countries that did not have policies as strict as yours had health care system collapses and the data shows they did not.
I do note that their Omicron model was last updated on January 4, and they say "we suspect that Omicron also does not affect the hourly multiplier, but do not have data for this". Their suspicion comes from a paper published on December 16 that uses data collected in the last two weeks of November.
In the UK we're still waiting on results from trials in schools [2] and we've barely started running trials in care homes [3], and this is 2 years in. In March 2020 our government was trying to comission Dyson to mass produce medical ventilators of questionable use for emergency, and yet we never really tried to get them to mass produce something that is their core competency and put it in classrooms and care homes.
HEPA filters are unobtrusive and can be made quite silent by using larger fans. Its mind boggling enough that we're barely using them, but its even more mind blowing that we have no trial data for them 2 years in.
There is also reason to believe they would work synergically with masks. All masks leak [8], some more than others - portable HEPA devices should take care to limit the (cumulative) effect of leakage to a minimum. Especially in indoor spaces where people spend long amounts of time, and especially in winter as well as in these "modern" business buildings with windows that don't open.
So why does this matter? Mainly because we keep pretending long covid doesn't exist. In the UK, ONS esimates that a 1.3 million (2% of the population) [4] people report long term symptoms, of which 1/2 million (nearly 1% of the entire population) have had them for 1 year or longer, with 247,000 (20%) reporting that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been “limited a lot”.
Information on vaccine protection from long covid has been conflicting [5], with some studies showing they enable return to baseline [6] while others showing almost no effect [7].
Additionally, since Omicron is so new, we don't (and cannot) have any long covid data on it.
It therefore makes sense to continue limiting spread and focus our effort on understanding long covid risk, prevention and treatment better, before completely lifting all restrictions. Especially if it can be done with the help of tools that are almost completely unobtrusive, such as portable HEPA filters.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02669-2
[2]: https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-health/news/article/4953/can-ai...
[3]: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2021/october/airfilter-study....
[4]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
[5]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2
[6]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v...
[7]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508v...
[8]: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118#:~:text=Medi...
This is misinformation.
I am pretty happy that the vax-mandaters are being taught a lesson by the virus. They would have pulled through otherwise.
Those days are gone because of vaccine mandates.
* 70% asymptomatic
* 25% minor symptoms with a 2 week recovery
* 0.5% chance of infecting central nervous system
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/effective...
Yes, maybe. I think that there is no good data that supports that for people under 70 without co-morbidities.
> However, the point has also been made that being vaccinated helps prevent more serious illness[1] which in turn can help prevent hospitals from collapsing under the weight of the severely ill.
Recently I found out that in my country at the peak of the most deadly wave only 5% of patients in hospitals were admitted because of Covid.
It does not prevent transmission, it does not stop hospitals from being overfilled and it does not stop symptomatic disease. What is a good science-based reason for mandatory vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 for everyone?
The fact that you had mild symptoms, or any sort of symptoms for that matter, while vaccinated does not actually imply that you would have been substantially worse off without the vaccine, given the statistical likelihood of mild infection.
This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.
For Omicron? And even if. It is great if it is a result of my personal decision to get vaccinated. It is awful to force others to get vaccinated, especially if most claims regarding efficacy get weakened a lot over time and people ignore that. Vaccine mandates and mandatory passports everywhere have failed and we should be happy about that.
Who also supports forced vaccinations like in Rwanda?
https://www.dw.com/en/rwanda-forcibly-vaccinating-people-aga...
How's that "wrong" or ignorant?
The t-cell response to infected cells learned from the vaccine, though, is very effective. Which is why vaccinated people still get infected (at a lower rate) but are many times less likely to get very sick, and almost none end up in ICU. The vaccines are effective.