Coronavirus

[Juggz]

I would point to the fact that the Swedish health service appear to be doing ok with it. You make a fair point that the voter only cares about the now and not the bigger picture though. We sell ourselves out much too easily in this country. I don't dispute the initial locking down in fact I think it came too late as it was, but it is looking increasingly unnecessary as time goes on and it irritates me that no one can stand up and say ok we may have been overcautious but we have a different idea now as more evidence comes to light from our own experience and I would respect the government more for having a pair of balls in that regard. Also you say it was to compensate for the other regular stuff that needs to be done but there has been none of it getting done, as reported by all mainstream news outlets in this country so that is a bit of a debatable point. Also the fact that the vast majority of these reported deaths have come from nursing homes or have been from unreported settings really adds fuel to the idea that a mass lock down was not what was needed, but I will concede that this is all being learned as time goes on and wasn't immediately apparent so I can't argue with the initial decision only how it has been handled since and is still being handled.

Small bit of an edit here to wonder why only one line of thinking gets on to RTE or the radio stations and ever reaches the ears of the average citizen around all this. Like even if yer one isn't right about everything there, surely her area of expertise and her experience and her seemingly high standing in the scientific community affords her the right to be heard, even if it is only to be rubbished. It's terrible that all dissenting voices be reduced to appearing with the likes of the ginger lad in the video, who if anything will add fuel to the fire of her opinion being discredited.

I didn't see any of the Bundesliga but mostly because I had no urge to do so in spite of being starved of soccer for so long. Is it really that bad without the crowd? Maybe a bit of canned laughter would add to proceedings, it seems to work for shit comedies

I work for a medical device company. We make, essentially, two types of devices: life saving ones and life enhancing ones. Emergency surgeries are still going ahead when possible. Life enhancing ones have been stopped dead. As a result, that side of the business is on its hole and production has stopped but we're still making the others, there is still a demand. Surgery is still taking place when it's needed.

[Juggz]

Hopefully it's a false alarm, Chris, all the best.

[astfgyl]

I work for a medical device company. We make, essentially, two types of devices: life saving ones and life enhancing ones. Emergency surgeries are still going ahead when possible. Life enhancing ones have been stopped dead. As a result, that side of the business is on its hole and production has stopped but we're still making the others, there is still a demand. Surgery is still taking place when it's needed.

Fair enough on the surgery side of things but I would count cancer screening as being in the life saving category. There are probably things which can wait as well though. I'm not au fait with the medical device industry so you would naturally know a lot more about that side of things than I would. Out of interest, because it seems like we are arguing over the finer points of things a lot in this thread, (not me and you I mean in general) do you have any opinion on the Government response and subsequent continuation of "Plan A" as it were?

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Hopefully it's a false alarm, Chris, all the best.

To be honest, I think we'd both prefer a positive result but an easy ride of it, will see tomorrow anyway. When the doctor came to the house, he had a very basic little test he was able to run on the spot to see if the infectiom was bacterial or not. Good to see that kind of smart thinking right on the frontline.

[mugz]

While I am inclined to agree with what she is saying and it supports a lot of my own thoughts and feelings around the whole situation I am equally inclined to block out yer man as much as I can as I feel he is getting in the way of what she is saying. He should have let her speak without leading it to other things to allow us all to make our own minds up on what she is saying rather than associating her with the usual Bill Gates and MSM thing which is always dismissed out of hand by 99% of people.

In the interests of balancing my own bias out with a small bit of research, I checked the number of deaths on rip.ie from April 2017, April 2018 and April 2019 and compared those with April 2020.

The results are:

April 2017 - 3194 Deaths.
April 2018 - 3476 Deaths.
April 2019 - 3487 Deaths.
April 2020 - 4934 Deaths.

The average taken from the first 3 years is 3386. Which leaves April 2020 at 1548 deaths above the average of the previous 3 years.

It still doesn't change what she says about vaccination not being the solution and still doesn't change the idea that the worldwide approach taken got out of hand very quickly, or what she says regarding social distancing and the manner of reporting. The fact there were 1500 deaths above average in a single month is worth thinking about though. My own take is that the vulnerable groups should have been looked after first and foremost but not in the way it was applied to basically everybody. There is for sure a narrative being spun here but it is not baseless by any means. I think the all-in approach taken by our government here was riddled with mistakes and hysteria but won't be rowed back on now and they will continue to provide evidence that only backs up what they have done rather than backs up the idea that they went too far and continue to do so. The evidence now is showing that schools probably shouldn't have been closed down and suddenly come reports of a Kawasaki Disease type of illness affecting children on the RTE website and the narrative that they did the right thing continues.

The whole lockdown approach to compensate for the expected surge was necessary due to the fact that our national health service was in shit. That is the fault of successive governments, not of the citizens. We pay our taxes, and they decide which wall to piss them up against as has always been the case. They piss our money away on imaginary banking debt for years while the banks continue to prosper, they piss it away on exorbitant and needless consultation fees before a block is ever laid on the worlds most expensive hospital in the worlds most inappropriate site with costs spiralling out of control and no desire to row back on it whatsoever in spite of it being a doomed project from the beginning. The money we have in this country that could have been pumped into fixing the health service from all types of angles is regularly pissed away on nothing at all. That is why we are locked down, and now they have to double down on the narrative that this is not years of failures by successive short sighted governments coming back to haunt us in the most economy crippling fashion of all time and so the merry go round continues and the carousel of shite continues to turn in front of our eyes. And we are all fucking heroes and there is no fate but that which we make for ourselves as we are driven by our cunt of a government into our fate not of our own making which will be years of financial ruin and deprivation of basic freedoms such as walking into a shop without a fucking mask on. Made for ourselves indeed.

We will be the ones paying for this with our money and our freedoms and I think we should be all casting a critical eye on how this whole thing was approached from day one and how things are generally done in this fucking backward cunt of a country which has the potential to be an actual great and fair and wonderful country but keeps getting dragged down by the short sighted nature of government and the greed associated with personal gain which has blighted this country for decades. If there was to be anything good to come of all this it should be the fixing of the things that are actually wrong at the source and not the sticking plaster of a lockdown and severe public controls to keep the narrative going that the government are doing the right thing to save us poor joes from ourselves because we don't know how to wash our fucking hands or not visit granny when we are sick. The real sickness at play here is what is being done in front of our eyes on a constant basis and not just since covid 19 came into the picture.

But everybody will forget about all of that when we are kindly told we can now travel 20km sometime in June now that we have behaved ourselves for long enough. We have been truly heroic strolling our 2km and our 5km, and all of us are very good children.

you're always so close to the truth. your posts are always reasonable and well written. take the last step man!

[hellfire]

Hopefully it's a false alarm, Chris, all the best.

To be honest, I think we'd both prefer a positive result but an easy ride of it, will see tomorrow anyway. When the doctor came to the house, he had a very basic little test he was able to run on the spot to see if the infectiom was bacterial or not. Good to see that kind of smart thinking right on the frontline.

Hopefully she'll be alright. My dad is 68 with a myriad of health complaints and he was fine after it.

[Carnage]

Fingers crossed for a good result for both of you, BSC.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

Cheers folks.

If we do die though, I hope I at least live long enough to see how astfgyl will get on in arriving to this truth he is so near to, yet which is also apparently ineffable!

[Caomhaoin]

J'espere que tout va bien.

I had to take my young lad to the ER on Tuesday at 3.30 am as he had abdominal pains (turns out he had a severe case of constipation, and after a laxative suppository, he laid a dinosaur egg which he was very proud of, me too if I'm honest) and they gave him the Covid test just to be sure. The doctor on duty told me it was just procedure, zero panic or histrionics.

The most annoying part of that episode was the parking charges for the hospital.

'What's a robbing bastard, Daddy'?

[hellfire]

Had to have one of those laxative suppositories last year. I have a rough idea what labour must be like since.

[Caomhaoin]

Ya, he didn't like it (good sign, wha?)

[Eoin McLove]

Cheers folks.

If we do die though, I hope I at least live long enough to see how astfgyl will get on in arriving to this truth he is so near to, yet which is also apparently ineffable!

All the best with the test. 

[astfgyl]

Cheers folks.

If we do die though, I hope I at least live long enough to see how astfgyl will get on in arriving to this truth he is so near to, yet which is also apparently ineffable!

Yeah I'm really curious to see how it pans out as well! Morpheus is calling round tomorrow to throw the red pill at me from a distance of 2 metres so hopefully I will be able to embrace (not physically, no touching!) the truth sometime shortly afterwards. I think you'll make it.

And Mugz, I could do with being spoon fed this truth you speak of so I can see what I think of it.

Is it that the extent of this virus has been twisted in a way that helps to line the pockets of some large commercial interests and that fear is being used as a tool to convince the populace to relinquish their human rights and to create an acceptance that they need to be dictated to rather than advised on how to look after themselves by governments all over the world, while decreasing resistance to technological surveillance techniques being deployed on a massive scale by using the public health vs freedom debate and the use of privately owned mass media outlets and other institutions such as privately funded scientific research to tip the scales in favour of those who would benefit from the proliferation of said surveillance and who also stand to make massive financial gains from the crippling of worldwide economies? I don't know.

Is it the use of the Hero tag on healthcare workers, which conveniently sidesteps the fact that they have been treated like shit for years and were in fact ready to go on strike prior to the current crisis? I don't know.

Is it the fact that we must all remain locked down in a state of quasi martial law to cover for the chronic mismanagement of public money in this country over a period spanning decades? Again I don't know.

Is the whole situation being taken advantage of by so many vested interests in so many different ways that it is impossible to know what is really any form of the truth anyway? I don't know.

Are worldwide public health policies being driven by media hype rather than concrete scientific evidence? I still don't know, although I do accept that this new to us all and the concrete evidence and statistics are still only emerging at the present time.

[Caomhaoin]

Agstyl, lad, I love you. But your posts are too long lad

[astfgyl]

  I know. And I do be trying to cut them short! It's a fair critique.