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I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

epsilontheory.com

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Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#51
post #49

This is really poorly reasoned. To take a couple examples: > Using data from flu monitoring programs in prior years, the CDC models project that 70 MILLION Americans have already gotten sick with symptomatic Covid, but decided to just write it off as a bad cold and never got tested. I am not making this up. Why is this hard to believe? Covid testing, especially depending on where you live, can be difficult to obtain.…

>"Social behaviors" are not what slows down Rt when you get to 60% of the entire human population infected; the number of targets gradually diminishes, slowing the spread. Or the virus mutates, and off you go on another round. We have a couple of corona viruses that are already endemic in the human population, what makes you think this one will just die out naturally?

I'm not talking about dying out entirely, I'm talking about an end to exponential growth.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29

Potatoes, a new world food, were a monoculture in Ireland at the time. These days there are a huge number of potato varieties grown, so a devastating potato blight seems unlikely to occur again.

The Russet Burbank potato is 70% of the US market. A blight of this cultivar would be devastating.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the exact same thing- "The Ireland Event" being the Catholic-Protestant conflict in the latter part of the 20th century

Really quck edit: this is probably the most controversial comment that I have posted here. However, without a proper survey I am still not convinced that someone will associate "the Irish problem" with the violence there. Take the discussion below with a grain of salt and I hope that you, assuming that you are in the west coast or Atlantic coast, consider if someone (a random person) in the Midwest will know this. To…

I'm not especially "intune with Europe", and that conflict ended when I was a small child, but I knew the violence extended to civilians. Not sure why you assume people wouldn't know that.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really quck edit: this is probably the most controversial comment that I have posted here. However, without a proper survey I am still not convinced that someone will associate "the Irish problem" with the violence there. Take the discussion below with a grain of salt and I hope that you, assuming that you are in the west coast or Atlantic coast, consider if someone (a random person) in the Midwest will know this. To…

Surely the bombs in London and Manchester were international news at the time, at least throughout the Western world? Next you'll tell me the average American is unaware of the 7 July bombs on the London Underground, the ETA bombs in Spain, Breivik in Norway or the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo.

I would guess that the average American (I really mean average here, not average among HN posters) will have heard of nothing on that list, but also not heard of any US political violence in that time period.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#55
post #46
post #13

Disclaimer: I'm Irish, working in tech but my hobby that gets me more of a social life is involvement with an Irish political party. The new variant accounted for 10-25% of these new cases over the period of that spike. The spike happened two weeks after Christmas when lock-down restrictions were lifted, as planned in October, so people could have a respite after 9 months of all this. Did the government misjudge just…

Also Irish. +1 on your assessment here. The virulent strain narrative was peddled by the Irish government who went against medical advice and tried to deflect blame. The evidence doesn’t support the narrative. I think the COVID-fatigue angle is quite interesting though. As critical as I am of the government they were under a lot of pressure from the populous to provide some sort of respite.

Agreed. To be honest the minute Fianna Fail came into government things slipped a bit and it feels like the pressure from business was allowed overwhelm the health advice. It was plainly obvious what was going to happen when they opened up. The annoying thing was that the last year was wasted by not increasing emergency capacity in ICU and getting the correct processes in place to create a fast roll-out of vaccination. Right now they are two weeks in a one one week delayed and only doing 40k a week at max.

I think also we allowed ourself to be "ah sure we can't do that here" compared to New Zealand. The short term economic aspect of things blinded us. If you were coming to the country as the case in the NZ, you should be in mandatory hotel quarantine which all the strict rules in place as needed. With the exception of essential services like hauliers. Every one says in Ireland things can't be done, they can be and people will die because we weren't brave enough to make tougher calls. We would be in much better shape if we had of. Don't get me started on the mess up North throughout the whole thing.

Ultimately though this is about people taking individual responsibility. It's frustrating everyone blaming the government, I have many friends in frontline services and the irresponsibility of some over christmas was crazy. People's friends and family are suffering for it now.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#56

This is really poorly reasoned. To take a couple examples: > Using data from flu monitoring programs in prior years, the CDC models project that 70 MILLION Americans have already gotten sick with symptomatic Covid, but decided to just write it off as a bad cold and never got tested. I am not making this up. Why is this hard to believe? Covid testing, especially depending on where you live, can be difficult to obtain.…

Until we have more precise IFR numbers, my simplistic "model" is just to divide the current death count by 0.005, which suggests around 78 million have had an infectious exposure in the US so far. The CDC number doesn't feel surprising.

Unfortunately a large number of those infections (far more than recorded cases) happened last spring, so millions of people could be losing their immunity if they've managed to avoid substantial re-exposures since then.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#57

When I read the headline I thought this article might be about domestic terrorism in the US. When I clicked on the article I saw it it was in fact about COVID-19. This is how I test my assumptions.

And I assumed it would be about the coronavirus, because the neurons that knew about the virus surge on the island answered first. And the framing of the event on "2 months" made me think of current events rather than distant past ones.

Context is the hard problem in NLP, I guess.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#58

This is really poorly reasoned. To take a couple examples: > Using data from flu monitoring programs in prior years, the CDC models project that 70 MILLION Americans have already gotten sick with symptomatic Covid, but decided to just write it off as a bad cold and never got tested. I am not making this up. Why is this hard to believe? Covid testing, especially depending on where you live, can be difficult to obtain.…

> Covid test just satisfies your curiosity, because you're going to be isolating anyway

This might be your personal bubble speaking. I have two non-tech friends (EMT and a labourer) who contracted Covid and both of their workplaces required a positive Covid test if they wanted to take two weeks off for quarantine.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#59
post #13

Disclaimer: I'm Irish, working in tech but my hobby that gets me more of a social life is involvement with an Irish political party. The new variant accounted for 10-25% of these new cases over the period of that spike. The spike happened two weeks after Christmas when lock-down restrictions were lifted, as planned in October, so people could have a respite after 9 months of all this. Did the government misjudge just…

Actually the new strain is already responsible for 45% of infections in Ireland (as per yesterday's NPHET briefing) while it was 10% at the beginning of the year IIRC

So yeah it's not the whole story, but it is an important part of it.

Re: I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months

#60
The author’s argument for why it’s implausible that a lot of people don’t get tested is literally “c’mon, man.” That not satisfying to me.

I was sick for a few days over the summer. Was it a mild case of Covid? I don’t know, or care. Why should I get tested when that information will change literally nothing about my life?

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