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

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

#201

Post by me_me_me »

Fordec wrote: 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 worth mentioning that due to low infection rates beforehand, the Irish population is more primed to be hit with bigger spike.

Infection has more chance to spread as only few people are immune. Other EU countries that already had large numbers of their people immune after recovering from covid.

And yeah, it was a perfect storm of badluck. Covid fatigue, xmas break, people from UK returning (with no oversight, spreading new strain) and of course Christmas dinner with uncles and aunts from each county :D

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

#202

Post by DanBC »

stefan_ wrote: post #63
DanBC wrote: post #45

Nice article, but it's flawed because it doesn't mention the cause of the spike is partly the backlog in testing over Christmas. Ireland have recently cleared that backlog, which contributed to the spike.

A backlog in testing? If you are gonna take more than like two days to process a test, why are you even testing?

You test a population to see how prevalent covid-19 is, how it's spreading, whether your containment efforts are working, what variants are spreading.

You test an individual to help you decide on appropriate healthcare.

It's really important that people who test negative still behave as if they might have covid and might spread covid.

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

#203

Post by tgb »

avs733 wrote: post #126
tgb wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't [4] widely criticized for messing up basic statistics? Either way, numbers from April might as well not exist for what they tell us about today.

I haven't seen a particular critique of that paper so can't comment. Bigger picture, I wasn't commenting on the particular validity of that paper as much as what this type of study could tell us...hindsight I should have picked an example from another disease.

Unfortunately that paper became my litmus test for people arguing from bad faith as it was such a darling of the "COVID is just the flu!" crowd. My memory of the main problem was that the confidence interval of the false positive rate of the test used included values higher than the entire positive rate of the sampled people. I.e. they didn't have enough data to rule out the claim that no one had COVID antibodies, let alone to justify that such a shockingly high percentage of the population could have had them already. Here's a random overview of the critiques that I found on google just now:

https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-...

Anyway, I'm sure better data exists at this point. The CDC survey data you linked to looks very interesting and seems to (with caveats) put the percent-immune at 16% or less as of a few months ago. It's sort of a middle ground with what the article here was claiming - 100 million immune Americans still seems to high but not by that much so given how cases have continued since the last serological survey results.

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

#204

Post by mam2 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #130
mam2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindsight is 10/10.

Uh, there was and is no "hindsight" involved here. The scientific consensus about coronavirus and how to fight it (wearing masks, lockdowns and contact tracing) was clear pretty shortly after the whole drama began. The problem was politicians, not just in the US, didn't have the guts to tell and explain their citizens that. The governments that did (New Zealand) or had prior epidemics experience / a population with a…

the hindsight is not about what we should "ideally do to fight the pandemic regardless of everything else". But if people really wanted it (for economic reason for start, you know poor people like being able to eat)...

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

#205

Post by caf »

flukus wrote: post #200
caf wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in general agreement with what you've said, but note that border closures are a far more difficult proposition for Ireland. The Good Friday Accords make closing the border with NI a political impossibility, and failing that you'd be relying on the UK instituting border/quarantine arrangements between Great Britain and NI.

I thought that border did close briefly? I understand it's a touchy issue, but here we had some rather soft closures between states as well, borders don't have to be binary opened or closed. In some instances people could work permits to cross the border, for others we made virtual borders so people that live near the border could cross but no one else could. At various times we've thrown up some new borders, people…

Remember this is somewhere that border checkpoints have in living memory been the target of violent attacks, where the idea of "partition" is at the core of the disagreements.

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

#206

Post by JSavageOne »

ryandrake wrote: post #190
drcross wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's selfish that you'd prefer to remain unfit and see a generation of children your daughter's age lose a year of socialising and education than to choose to isolate yourself and let them live their lives if you really were so worried about a disease with a average IFR of .05%. It's a crab in a bucket mentality.

Part of the benefit of living in a civilized society is that civilized people don’t throw entire demographics to their death for the convenience of others. We are supposed to have the decency to make sacrifices for the benefit of the greater good, but our ability to do this seems to be quickly disappearing. I’m really sorry my kid can’t go on play dates for a year, because it helps save other people’s lives. I also f…

Nobody's throwing anybody to death. You seem to be advocating forcing everyone hostage in their homes, all over a virus that's not particularly dangerous (eg. 0.05% death rate for thus under 40, median age of death = 82). That's outrageous, and of course people don't want that because it's torture, and completely pointless and unnecessary. What a position of privilege to be able to advocate this garbage while being able to work remotely when many have lost their jobs and businesses.

We never had any government mandated home hostage orders during WWII.

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