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We promise to be good for Santa

Head Rambles Posted on by

Holohan was on the telly last night.

He is our Chief Medical Guru and the Voice of Doom every evening when he announces that latest batch of figures and endless statistics.

I’m sure he’s a nice enough chap but fuckit he’s a fierce cautious bastard when it comes to Rona. I can see his point of view which is purely from the medical perspective and an over reliance on mathematical modelling. He was “cautiously optimistic” about the future provided we all behave ourselves and keep our “social distancing” and all all that crap. Ideally he would like all of us to lock ourselves in a room for the next six weeks.

I have been keeping a weary eye on things and have been watching the figures in passing. One of the yokes I found shows the trends of “positive tests” and deaths since the start –

Now three things occur to me looking at that graph.

The first is that the reason for the huge second peak in confirmed cases is down more to increased testing than any great resurgence of Rona.

The second is the confirmed deaths graph. A bit of a blip around May but it has been remarkably stable since then. It certainly doesn’t correlate with the other graph.

The third thing is the second peak. To my semi-trained eye that looks suspiciously like a graph which has reached its highest and is starting a downward trend again. I might be wrong but I’m prepared to take a punt on it.

We have just entered another six weeks of lockdown. And just before this lockdown started the figures started to improve. It is nonsense to credit the lockdown with that improvement, but we can be sure that the “experts” will claim all the credit and use it as an excuse for stricter and more prolonged measures. “Just look at how we crushed the second wave with our restrictions” they will cry. “We must have harsher measures to keep it at bay”.

Holohan has handed us a carrot though.

If we behave ourselves and keep strictly to his rules then he will allow us celebrate Christmas!

What a magnanimous man?

 

Comments

We promise to be good for Santa — 13 Comments

  1. Are they arresting people yet who do not conform to the 'rules'? I'd celebrate Christmas whether they did or not. What are they going to do? Demand entry just to see if you have Christmas decorations up?

    • They have brought in a raft of fines ranging from €50 up to around €10,000 which can be applied to anyone not conforming, including travelling more than 5km from home or not wearing a face nappy.  There are road blocks everywhere [or so I hear] and they are having a great time finding drugs, drugged drivers and uninsured cars!

      They cannot enter a private home but can stand at the door and fine everyone coming out if there is a party in progress.  It's all rather surreal.

  2. I wish they would stop calling tests "cases", especially as many test are done on symptom-less people, who may or may not have had a passing acquaintance with the SARS-CoV-2 bug at sometime in the last 7 months.  A "case" traditionally means someone with symptoms of an illness, but, hey, keep up the panic level!

    Then there are the false positives and negatives (results which no politicians and many medics do not fully understand), from the RT-PCR tests which were never developed or intended to be used for screening.  The whole thing stinks.

    But although masks are useless at stopping microscopic particles, their widespread use has been effective in reducing the normal autumnal increases of Flu and Pneumonia.  This could be because the masks remind everyone to keep apart and wash their hands, so at least they have some positive effect.

    • Masks in a clinical setting do their job and do it well, but infection control is like a game of snakes and ladders rigged in favour of the snakes.  Get one thing wrong and you might as well not have bothered.  You wear a surgical mask in operating theatre in conjunction with freshly sterile-laundered scrubs and disinfected boots, with your hands thoroughly washed up past the elbows and they work.  Wear a mask with street clothes and you've lost most of your protection.  Back to square one.

      The reduction of cold and flu infections is probably due to the fact that people aren't in their usual close social contact.  The masks are mostly just a placebo, a totem.  Something to hang on to, even though they don't work the way many people think they do.

  3. The worlometers coronavirus figures for Sweden are very interesting.

    However it is a case of " I may have mentioned Sweden, but I think I got away with it. "

    Elephant? What elephant? You say there is a great multicoloured pachiderm in the room? No, don't see it.

     

  4. Hi GD, not sure about Ireland, but in UK there is some increase in “Covid Deaths” *But* the “all-cause” mortality figures have been normal for months now.

    The killer plague is long gone, just the usual numbers of folks are dyeing as do any year but we are testing lots of people for the Covid and anyone who dies after a positive test, whether true or false positive, is counted as a “Covid Death”.

    Lots of good info and links over at Lockdown Skeptics, recommended…

    Stay safe now – look both ways before crossing the road and never run with scissors 😉

  5. It's never been about health of the body but it is a disease of the mind. To everyone that takes a walk into their local cemetery,, if you are carried in them in you  likely won't care, that it is not filling up at an alarming rate way in excess of 2019's effort.

    People it seems are sucked in by the talking heads on their screens. It's the same M/O all over the world. bought and paid for medical 'experts' revelling in the control freak position they have found themselves in spouting complete bollocks and then political faces go driving through insane and unworkable restrictions onto people on the back of what is basically numrical massaging.

    'Top' politicians always catch The CV, Varadkar, Trump. Johnson and now the top man in Poland has caught it, not to mention a slew of celebs and Big Ears over here though somehow The Queer and the Duck have missed it despite being over 90! Naturally none isolate for the full period you and I are told to isolate for but hey they are at the top for a reason and we ain't.

    Have you seen what the Welsh 'top man and his crew' have put into force in their little Principality?
    Come the revolution!

  6. Re the graph, the lack of testing means that the first peak is almost certainly a gross underestimate of the number of cases,. However, the increase in positive tests means that the second peak does represent a real increase in prevalence. It is not possible yet to read anything for the decrease in numbers over the last two days. I hope you are right and agree that instituting Level 5 may well have been overly coservative, though it should also be siad that NEPHET has access to more data than we do. Death rate is not very useful because it lags infections by about 18 days so though has been a rise much of it has yet to come, You can expect Public Health people to be narrowly focussed on health and overly inclined to command and control, which is why it is for policians who we cn lod to account to take the actual decisions on what to do, and taking into account a wider perspective.

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