We should nudge away, but be slow to exclude. Some of these other countries have a past history of authoritarianism. This graph is interesting when talking about capacity (though I can't speak to its veracity).
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Will you go for a pint when restrictions are lifted?
- Thread starter Bronco Lane
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We should need far fewer beds. I had a hernia operation about 25 years ago and we in hospital for 3 days. I had it done again about 10 years ago and was in and out in 6 hours. 20 years ago heart surgery required cracking open the entire rib cage and required weeks in hospital. Now it's usually done through your groin and a few days in hospital.
Yeah but we are talking intensive care and high dependency beds here. As far as I know before the pandemic, we had the lowest number of ICU beds per population in OECD. These beds require highly skilled staff and can't just be turned on at the drop of a hat. The number of beds stayed static since 2014 until 2020. Over 10 years ago, there were reports calling for a large increase in critical care beds but nothing was done. Probably because there is nothing 'sexy' about providing beds that might be lying idle for a large part of the year....... It just sums up the Health Service that has been drowning for years despite more and more billions being spent on it.
According to this gov.ie Open Beds Report (PDF) they managed to increase overall bed capacity by only 144 in the year from March 2020 to March 2021. Gross 
lack of ambition in the face of a pandemic.
lack of ambition in the face of a pandemic.So you deliberately chose emotive language, evoking a brutal regime for the purposes of exaggerating the situation.
That actually doesn't make sense.
How do any of the issues you have raised apply more to the unvaccinated? Are you suggesting if we had more ICU capacity that it would mainly be occupied by the vaccinated? It seems more a list of common gripes with the health service with little relevance to vaccination status.
The unvaccinated are not simply 'just a part of the mix', they are a significantly over-represented majority.
Please.
I seems clear to me. Maybe, you're right.
Nope. Just that if we had more capacity we wouldn't be looking a lockdown/exclusion measures right now and Covid might burn itself out before such was necessitated.
Surely it must burn out soon. Of the 5m of us we have approx. 1m under 12's, they aren't clogging hospitals with Covid. We have 4m others, 3.5m of whom are fully vaccinated. We have had over 0.5m confirmed cases and likely multiples of that unconfirmed. Of the 0.5m over 12 and unvaccinated, there can't be that big a pool who haven't yet had Covid and are likely to end in an ICU bed when they do.
Perhaps that's part of the problem, the question as phrased does not make sense, the mixing of tenses and singulars/plurals renders it impossible to know for sure what you were trying to ask.
But we have the capacity we have. Our restrictions shouldn't relate to some aspirational state where we have the health service of our dreams. You're clearly against the current restrictions on the unvaccinated, so we can only assess that in terms of the current state of the health service.
Or the last 8% could get vaccinated and we'd free up about half the beds taken up by Covid patients. That's a simpler option. And cheaper; we have thrown billions at the health service and it hasn't improved things much.
Imagine how bad it would be if it wasn't staffed by highly trained exceptional dedicated selfless medical professional heroes!
Yes I've had same thought... hard to tell, but curious to know how many of the unvaccinated have had covid already, although I'm not sure how much protection an Alpha variant infection spring 2020 would afford against Delta variant today.
It really annoys me when GDP is used as an indicator for health spending when everyone knows that our GDP is grossly inflated. Our spending relative to *GNI is very high. In real terms we are amongst the highest spenders on healthcare in both relative and absolute terms. When adjusted for demographics it's even higher. In reality we have one of the best funded healthcare systems in the world.
We are world class, but it's at wasting money.
Edit: post crossed with @odyssey06
Argo.
As stated, I was only referring to the graph, which I though was interesting. They may or may not have changed how they count these things . . perhaps this is a better graph. In any event, not much was done to increase capacity over the past 20 months. Currently we have fewer than 1/3 of the numbers in hospital with covid than we did in January and 100 fewer in ICU . . and the curve looks much flatter.
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Imposing restrictions , such as earlier closing times in pubs and clubs, on vaccinated people, will only drive the unvaccinated further away from getting vaccinated. Holohan wanting vaccinated people to avoid Christmas parties and stay at home over the festive season won't help either.
The unvaccinated already know vaccines are fairly useless in preventing infection and transmission so the only selling point is that vaccines reduce hospitalizations and death, which they do.
But sars cov2 is harmless to most people anyway so the unvaccinated will know that they are unlikely to end up sick and/or in hospital if they get infected.
Some will also have natural immunity from prior infection.
The unvaccinated already know vaccines are fairly useless in preventing infection and transmission so the only selling point is that vaccines reduce hospitalizations and death, which they do.
But sars cov2 is harmless to most people anyway so the unvaccinated will know that they are unlikely to end up sick and/or in hospital if they get infected.
Some will also have natural immunity from prior infection.
That is an interesting point re: earlier closing times removing an incentive to get vaccinated.
But the vaccines reduce infection and transmisison, not totally but signifcantly even against Delta. To describe them as 'fairly useless' in that regard is incorrect in light of the below... although this not seem well publicised by mainstream media here.
How much less likely are you to spread covid-19 if you're vaccinated?
Vaccination still greatly reduces the risk of infecting others despite the arrival of the delta variant, recent studies show
www.newscientist.com
The educated among us know the vaccines are very effective at preventing infection and transmission, not 100% but very effective. These are well proven facts.
Paul O Mahoney
Registered User
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Will they? We have seen numerous reports of people getting infected twice and I know of one person who has been infected 3 times.
Don't we have a soccer player who has been infected twice.
"Natural immunity " is an oxymoron as you can develop a resistance to a virus that resistance wanes too, look at the common cold, flu, pneumonia to name a few.
Vaccines, anti virals , immunity by infection are not panacea in themselves .No virus has ever been eradicated they live on our medical technology has simply kept them in check.
HIV/AIDS has killed 40m people, best estimate, probably more. There are viruses that we simply cannot fight as humans, and Covid might be one.
Agreed
Smallpox has and we just don't know what ones have just died out the first SARS virus kind of just died out by itself.
HIV/AIDS is a very different virus to COVID.
The well educated among us know that you don't have to look to far to hear contrary viewpoints such as those expressed recently by the "uneducated" Professor McConkey and Dr De Gascun, never mind the recent article published in the Lancet which found that:
"People who have two doses of vaccine have a lower, but still appreciable risk, of becoming infected within the Delta variant." and also that
"Peak viral load is similar in the vaccinated and unvaccinated which may explain why they can readily pass on the virus in household and indoor settings.