Easing of restrictions from April 12th

Sunny said:
Not really since it is still limited to two households which I struggle to understand....
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Yes, two. Let’s give it a month or so and see what sort of impact it has.
We know that fully vaccinated people will not die and will not get seriously ill. We don’t know (yet) to what extend they may pass on the virus, to others who are not vaccinated in the household of someone vaccinated.

If we learned anything from the phased reopening of society last summer, it’s that accelerating it is not a good idea.

What’s the rush?
 
EasilyAmused said:
Yes, two. Let’s give it a month or so and see what sort of impact it has.
We know that fully vaccinated people will not die and will not get seriously ill. We don’t know (yet) to what extend they may pass on the virus, to others who are not vaccinated in the household of someone vaccinated.

If we learned anything from the phased reopening of society last summer, it’s that accelerating it is not a good idea.

What’s the rush?
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What data are you expecting to see after a month? People who are vaccinated are not allowed to visit a house with unvaccinated people. We are talking about everyone being vaccinated. So only two vaccinated people or two vaccinated households can meet. So two 75 year old vaccinated women can meet up for a coffee but they can't invite a third vaccinated person? What's the point? Let vaccinated people meet up. I would even let personal services open for vaccinated over 70's as I can see the impact of something really simple like not having her hair done is having on my elderly mother's general mental health.
 
People that have been vaccinated with Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are 80% less likely to transmit Covid-19.
The reduction, if any, with AstraZeneca is unknown.
Movement of people, in this case the movement of vaccinated people, needs to be limited for the time being.
They may not be able to pass the virus onto the vaccinated person they’re visiting, but they may pass it into the hairdresser or the baker they bought some cake from.

I had Covid last year. It was reasonable to believe I was immune for up to six months afterward. This didn’t exempt me from visiting a friend who had Covid.

We’re all in this together, vaccinated, post-Covid or otherwise.
 
Merowig said:
And the GAA is essential how exactly?
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Sun dried tomatoes and moisturiser and hair dye and thousands of other things aren't essential but we can still buy them. There are lots of things that aren't essential but we have to function as a society and try to reduce the collateral damage caused by the irrational fear around this virus.

A really good example of over reaction to a crisis was how Japan reacted to the Fukushima nuclear "disaster". The International Atomic Agency said that the radiation levels caused by the meltdown were so low that they posed no danger to human health but the populist reaction saw around 200,000 people relocated from the area. It is estimated that the move contributed to the deaths of 500 mostly elderly people, far more than died due to the accident or would have died if nobody was evacuated. We need to be careful that we don't concentrate on one thing to the determent of the bigger picture.
 
Sunny said:
I would even let personal services open for vaccinated over 70's as I can see the impact of something really simple like not having her hair done is having on my elderly mother's general mental health.
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So we'll have more people moving around, travelling outside their 5Km and generally mixing.
I think that once we have vaccinated everyone over 60 we should open everything up. We'll have vaccinated over 90% of the people who are likely to end up in hospital or die. We have one of the best funded health services in the world. It's time they stopped making excuses for their waste and inefficiency and sorted themselves out because their organisational incompetence is the reason we are the most locked down country in the EU.
 
Purple said:
So we'll have more people moving around, travelling outside their 5Km and generally mixing.
I think that once we have vaccinated everyone over 60 we should open everything up. We'll have vaccinated over 90% of the people who are likely to end up in hospital or die. We have one of the best funded health services in the world. It's time they stopped making excuses for their waste and inefficiency and sorted themselves out because their organisational incompetence is the reason we are the most locked down country in the EU.
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We were having days of 6000 cases with restrictions.
If you start having 10,000 cases a day then you are still going to end up with a significant number of 'unlikely' hospitalizations and long covid cases.
That's why we can't just open everything up and let this thing rip.
 
I friend of mine sent me a text from the USA last weekend.
He was having a beer in a pub (photo sent too) while his daughter was gone to softball training and his son gone to a friends birthday party.

That’s three activities that are not permitted here. In fact, two of them are impossible.

Because of their fast vaccine rollout, things are opening up fast in the USA.

However, their cases jumped by 15% in one day just a few days ago.

Vaccines are not a silver bullet. They’re just another arrow in the quiver.
 
Furthermore, it’s generally agreed that B117 is a very different beast from last years Covid-19.
Little is known about P1, except that it’s bad. 10% of the cases in France are P1. Their hospitals are at capacity, their schools are closing, and they’re going into lockdown again.
What of other variants like South Africa, Nigeria, Bristol and California? These are the new ones we know about, what about the new variants we don’t know about (yet)?
 
EasilyAmused said:
Furthermore, it’s generally agreed that B117 is a very different beast from last years Covid-19.
Little is known about P1, except that it’s bad. 10% of the cases in France are P1. Their hospitals are at capacity, their schools are closing, and they’re going into lockdown again.
What of other variants like South Africa, Nigeria, Bristol and California? These are the new ones we know about, what about the new variants we don’t know about (yet)?
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So do we stay in lockdown forever?
Or for years?

At some stage we have to stop spending our children's future while at the same time we wreck it.
I don't know what the answer is but at some stage we have to face the music.
 
True.
The more people that are vaccinated, the less virus there is around, and the less chance there is of the virus mutating into new variants.

In six months time most of the western world should have herd immunity within their borders.

The problem is new variants elsewhere. This could rumble on indefinitely in non Zero Covid countries.
 
EasilyAmused said:
In six months time most of the western world should have herd immunity within their borders.

The problem is new variants elsewhere. This could rumble on indefinitely in non Zero Covid countries.
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Which goes back to the fact that we should stop vaccinating people under the age of 50 or 45 until all the older people in the rest of the world are vaccinated.
I'm uncomfortable getting a vaccine before someone else who is 50-100 times more likely to die from the disease.

It also shows just how utterly stupid that Zero Covid nonsense is since there's no way of maintaining such a strategy without a North Korea type border or a perpetual lockdown.
 
The Zero Covid countries will vaccinate their entire populations later. NewZealand has already begun vaccinating.
Then they’ll be in the same boat as everyone else.

Except they’ll have none of the negative effects of national yo-yo lockdown, they’ll have a greater choice of vaccines to choose from, arguably vaccines that have been designed with B117, P1, etc as targets as well as the parent strain, and they’ll cost less too.
Oh, and in the case of NZ, a body count of 26.

BTW, Zero Covid means zero tolerance to Covid.
Zero Covid does not mean Zero Vaccine.
 
EasilyAmused said:
BTW, Zero Covid means zero tolerance to Covid.
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That means perpetual lockdowns as new variants appear. It means a hard border (one with high walls) with the UK.
The cost of the vaccines is dwarfed by the cost of the lockdown.

New Zealand is 4,000km from its nearest neighbour. We are closer to North America. Comparing us, or anyone else, to New Zealand is stupid.
 
There is no lockdown in New Zealand at present. There has been no national lockdown there since August. There are no masks. There is no social distancing. Life is normal except that the ports and airports are free of international travellers, and 26 families are grieving loved ones lost to Covid-19.
Every few weeks a case is found. That case is traced and isolated, and there is a five day local lockdown. The body count remains at 26.

Zero Covid does not mean Zero Vaccination:

For the next couple of months they’ll be vaccinating 7,500 people each day, then ramping up to over 50,000 per day.

Come July they expect receiving vaccines faster than they can be administered.

And that’s just New Zealand. Isle of Man is Zero Covid.

Vietnam borders three other countries, has a population of 100,000,000 is Zero Covid and has a body count of 33 or so.
 
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EasilyAmused said:
There is no lockdown in New Zealand at present. There has been no national lockdown there since August. There are no masks. There is no social distancing. Life is normal except that the ports and airports are free of international travellers, and 26 families are grieving loved ones lost to Covid-19.
Every few weeks a case is found. That case is traced and isolated, and there is a five day lockdown.
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Again; New Zealand is 4,000Km from its nearest neighbour. It's up there with the international space station when it comes to being far away from the next guy. It is the most isolated country in the world with a temperate climate.
 
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