Coronavirus

[Trev]

Fully grown scumbags looting, burning and in some cases killing, very bad, young f'las on the green chucking a few black cat bangers around the estate, not the worst, I'd argue. Most of us probably indulged in the latter, but hopefully not the former because if you did, you couldn't really complain if you got a slap of a baton across the chops.

Not as bad no, but young fellas going around burning up greens and wrecking them, setting the local playground on fire, shooting fireworks at people's houses and at then at them when they go outside, smashing in car windows and basically using Halloween as an excuse to be utter scumbags, deserve all the battering they get

[Trev]

Hospitals have never been so empty.

Only going from personal experience, but the missus is getting at least one or two texts a week for overtime shifts because of how busy they are. I'm not saying that it's all down to covid but they're nowhere near empty

[Kurt Cocaine]

Hospitals have never been so empty.

Only going from personal experience, but the missus is getting at least one or two texts a week for overtime shifts because of how busy they are. I'm not saying that it's all down to covid but they're nowhere near empty

Ah yes, now they're not. As you'd expect when any flu season kicks in.

[Trev]

It's barely the start of flu season, and this has been happening for months

Again I'm not saying it's all due to covid, more likely a legacy of underfunding the health service, but to say hospitals just doesn't ring true. At least in terms of ICU capacity

[Kurt Cocaine]

It's barely the start of flu season, and this has been happening for months

Again I'm not saying it's all due to covid, more likely a legacy of underfunding the health service, but to say hospitals just doesn't ring true. At least in terms of ICU capacity

I should have elaborated, but I wasn't just talking about Ireland.

[astfgyl]

The flu disappearing around the world is an odd one. Have seen suggestions of viral interference i.e. coronavirus beating out influenza, and also suggestions of flu patients being reclassified as covid. Hard to know really at this stage. I did have a look into flu testing and it is actually up since last year but the figures are still down to where they are. Weird.

That got me thinking then of PCR testing for influenza. If PCR at 45 cycles is picking up dead fragments of RNA in healthy people for covid, why then isn't it doing the same for flu and giving us lots of asymptomatic cases of that? I think the answer might be in the fact that only people who show symptoms are tested for flu and so fulfil the criteria for actual cases (positive test along with clinical symptoms), while the covid policy of testing basically anyone at all gives a wildly overblown picture of the severity of the outbreak. That is of course a fantastic resource for immunology studies, but does allow the hype to overtake the reality somewhat.

I posted the hpsc advice around testing a bit back and predicted numbers to fall in the next couple of weeks due to this proposed change in notification policy and it looks to be coming to fruition, but that could just be coincidence as I don't actually know if that has been implemented.

[Kurt Cocaine]

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10223627396730663&id=1163565889

[Giggles]

What was that? It's been removed

[Caomhaoin]

The flu disappearing around the world is an odd one. Have seen suggestions of viral interference i.e. coronavirus beating out influenza, and also suggestions of flu patients being reclassified as covid. Hard to know really at this stage. I did have a look into flu testing and it is actually up since last year but the figures are still down to where they are. Weird.

That got me thinking then of PCR testing for influenza. If PCR at 45 cycles is picking up dead fragments of RNA in healthy people for covid, why then isn't it doing the same for flu and giving us lots of asymptomatic cases of that? I think the answer might be in the fact that only people who show symptoms are tested for flu and so fulfil the criteria for actual cases (positive test along with clinical symptoms), while the covid policy of testing basically anyone at all gives a wildly overblown picture of the severity of the outbreak. That is of course a fantastic resource for immunology studies, but does allow the hype to overtake the reality somewhat.

I posted the hpsc advice around testing a bit back and predicted numbers to fall in the next couple of weeks due to this proposed change in notification policy and it looks to be coming to fruition, but that could just be coincidence as I don't actually know if that has been implemented.

Woaaaaah there big lad, there's only room for one ladín to bamboozle the common man with medical jargon on this board!

[Kurt Cocaine]

Yes, we'll have no preponderantisms on this forum. Right... 

[Kurt Cocaine]

What was that? It's been removed

https://www.facebook.com/560689457/posts/10158937781309458/?sfnsn=wa

[Kurt Cocaine]

Freedom in Sweden man....

[astfgyl]

The flu disappearing around the world is an odd one. Have seen suggestions of viral interference i.e. coronavirus beating out influenza, and also suggestions of flu patients being reclassified as covid. Hard to know really at this stage. I did have a look into flu testing and it is actually up since last year but the figures are still down to where they are. Weird.

That got me thinking then of PCR testing for influenza. If PCR at 45 cycles is picking up dead fragments of RNA in healthy people for covid, why then isn't it doing the same for flu and giving us lots of asymptomatic cases of that? I think the answer might be in the fact that only people who show symptoms are tested for flu and so fulfil the criteria for actual cases (positive test along with clinical symptoms), while the covid policy of testing basically anyone at all gives a wildly overblown picture of the severity of the outbreak. That is of course a fantastic resource for immunology studies, but does allow the hype to overtake the reality somewhat.

I posted the hpsc advice around testing a bit back and predicted numbers to fall in the next couple of weeks due to this proposed change in notification policy and it looks to be coming to fruition, but that could just be coincidence as I don't actually know if that has been implemented.

Woaaaaah there big lad, there's only room for one ladín to bamboozle the common man with medical jargon on this board!

I know. I had to tidy up me arguments big style after how many times he handed it to me on technicalities!

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

France reported 854 deaths yesterday, with a more or less 50/50 split between hospitals and nursing homes/hospices. Setting aside the question of whether they were "legitimate" COVID deaths or not, there were only a handful of days with higher mortality levels than that at the peak of the pandemic in March/April.

[astfgyl]

France had an average of 1647 deaths per day in 2018. Probably high degree of variance for different months but that is the rough daily average. I'll be very interested to see the total all-cause mortality for the year when the figures are available to try get a good handle on the actual impact of covid and put to bed the from/with argument. Be a couple of months now but my guess is that it will be somewhere in between the two extremes of opinion.

Ireland so far this year is tracking below average for all-cause mortality. Taking population size into account for a rough estimate, France has 13 times the population of the Republic but their rolling average from the last week is 392.6 covid deaths vs Ireland's 3.6 average. So France's average covid-related death toll is 109 times greater than here. Of course population size is a blunt instrument which doesn't take into account age profile or indeed any other demographics, but still the difference is stark.

Would like to see a bit more detail around the French counting method vs the Irish one but I imagine they are broadly similar. Ireland's total deaths from 2018 is 31,116 vs France's 601,000. That is around 1/20th here for 1/13th of the population, but doesn't give much indication of the reason for the 1/100th of the death rate due to covid. What are France getting so wrong?

Curiouser and curiouser said Alice sometime either before or after falling down the rabbit hole or around when she was coming up on the mushies. Supposedly she said it anyway in the face of some sort of weirdness.