If Varadkar was fully in touch with his constituents at home and abroad instead of living in his Covid bubble fed by hot air from NPHET, he would have challenged NPHET to make their lockdown plans known for the Xmas period. So that travellers mostly immigrants for whom XMAS planning begins in early November, can book their homeward bound flights knowing what NPHET plans are for Xmas.
Instead he’s advising all to postpone their plans until NPHET publish their results and advice early December; another example of their messing with people’s lives to add to their lockdown of the elderly and their aim to destroy the economy. Was lockdown level 5 a product of fear mongering inability to let Covid Lockdown 3 levels fully take root?
“Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that he “most likely” has a moderate case of COVID-19, while questioning the reliability of the tests he has had.
Asked by a Twitter user about his symptoms, he wrote that they feel “just like a regular cold, but more body achy & cloudy head than coughing/sneezing.”
On Friday, he told his 40 million Twitter followers that he had “Mild sniffles & cough & slight fever past few days.”
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On Thursday, he tweeted that he has had two negative and two positive tests from different labs, saying: “Something extremely bogus is going on.”
Positive results in the test he appears to have taken — an antigen test — are described by the FDA as “highly accurate.” But false negatives are also possible — meaning that a negative doesn’t necessarily rule out the positive test.”
I would question the high accuracy claimed based on his results.
I lend my own scepticism re testing to that of Elon Musk. Plus even if the positives present as heavy or mild flu like symptoms, surely that’s a good cause not to be as concerned over Covid. Its not a typhoid epidemic.
If we look at the above chart taken from the Covid-19 data hub https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgis.com/ we see cases rising but deaths are relatively stable and in relatively small numbers. Each death is a devastating loss.
It appears NPHET and government are in lockdown to avoid extra required investment in our health service. Their concerns are merely financial rather than ‘for the people’. Investment in our health service is still miniscule compared to our needs as a growing population. Never mind the investment needed to provide for Covid-19 and future pandemic outbreaks. Exception has to be made for investment in our Children’s Hospital to be built twice as large as required with runaway billions of misspent taxpayers money instead of on a greenfield site on the periphery of the city at James Connolly Hospital.
Some of us believe Cocid 19 is over hyped and lockdowns are a waste of public resources causing more damage to society than Covid 19.
A waste of resources keeping workers at home to increase rates of alcohol and other forms of abuse including deaths by suicide and neglect of other health concerns re cancer and other life threatening conditions, lengthening hospital waiting lists. Never mind loss of productivity and the billions required to further scuttle our economy.
Resources concentrated on protecting the elderly and those that are made vulnerable through manifold underlying conditions are required urgently.
Notwithstanding the ill preparedness of our health service, Fear-mongering needs to be challenged and more data needs to be gathered than appears on the Covid-19 data hub.
Apart from helping to calculate over time the R Rate:
“The R number is a way of rating coronavirus or any disease’s ability to spread. R is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average. Measles has an R number of 15 in populations without immunity. That means, on average, one person will spread measles to 15 others”
Statistics re Covid are sparse and generally not publicly available and certainly not available on this website.
We are not told the domicile of each individual with Covid to help us track the likelihood of spread of the disease through individual clusters in Wicklow. Neither are we told the ages of those infected. Nor do we get any data on recovery rates eg patients entering and leaving hospital due to Covid. Track and trace has been a dismal failure and Nphet must take responsibility and accountability for the poor organisation of same.
We certainly do not get any track and trace information to enable us to isolate the virus on a community by community basis. So we don’t know how its being transmitted. Perhaps its being transmitted through asymptomatic children in our schools, who knows?
The occasional and rare track and trace is generated in the media to induce further fear-mongering mostly highlighting instances of people travelling from abroad who’ve reported symptoms!
But our airports and borders are largely open with further news of the rather ludicrous and optional test for 180euro some opportunists in the private sector have devised that will allow visitors to end isolation 5 days following arrival if test proves negative.
How many visitors even follow the current rules, its uselessness a consequence of lack of mandatory obligation. Who can afford the test, it should be free!
NPHET and government have been complicit in the neglect of resources required to stave off Covid in favour of the blunt instrument of lockdown that is counter productive.
Initially, last March, up to 28000 medical workers were alleged to have returned to Ireland to help our health service cope with the coming crisis. Over the summertime the media was awash with stories of volunteers unable to get interviews for positions in our health service, never mind posts.
Many reported being offered zero hour contracts meaning they would not be paid for stay at home waits in the hope they might be called in for some menial hourly rate.
Our hospitals still suffer from acute bed shortages that would still be so were we not to have Covid in our midst. Instead of lockdowns and worries about the R rate of transmission with 80% or more recovery rates, we should instead concentrate on hospital admissions and fatalities due to Covid. In that regard, highest priority with the best protocols need putting in place to identify and protect the vulnerable.
In the face of disaray, lack pf preparedness, incompetence, lack of investment, Nphet’s level 5 blunt instrument can mask all of these, its become their instrument of choice.
The general population are aware of best practice how to protect themselves and public health campaigns provide help to individuals and communities on best practice how to do this. Government is doing little to help in this regard. Provided with more data the public can act with more effect than the mess being made by government in its management of the epidemic.
Part 11
Failing to follow simple rules will have massive effects on society. Irrespective of whether Supreme Court Judge Seamus Woulfe should resign having broken Covid advisory regulations related to the right of assembly, he should resign not because of not following such advice, but because attendance at infamous Oireachtas Golf Society outing filled with politicians and their political lobbyists from the financial world as part of a so-called independent judiciary, such gatherings by definition should be avoided by those in his position.(1) One can imagine such gatherings decide the membership and directorship of many influential boards in the private sector.
Ireland this year will borrow 24bn seeing its borrowing obligations increase from 200bn to 250bn over next 10 yrs. The ECB will buy any bond issued by any member of the EU. The money is being spent to dismantle national economies with close downs, shut downs, loss of jobs. Few believe a magical vaccine will lead to a V type recovery.
Its troubling the comfortable ease with which government can borrow 24bn that conceivably could have been borrowed to deal with our housing crisis or build much needed infrastructure in the health and education sector.
I thought we had a housing emergency, apparently not!
Government appears have all but abandoned the real business of government as they’ve leapt together mostly joined at the hip into the Covid septic tank.
However, against the tide, some TD’s do make an effort. Francis Duffy of The Greens dropped a leaflet into our postbox. Its contents dramatically highlight the rottenness of public housing policy in Ireland (I’m apolitical not a member of any party).
Frank submitted a synopsis to an Bord Pleanala (ref SHD3ABP – 307222-2)
“The Strategic Housing Development Scheme of 2017 allowed that SHD’s could unfairly circumvent local authority development plans. I believe that the state should not be complicit in these housing models, which only serve to create transient workforces and unsustainable communities, and lack fair and democratic public participation”.
498 residential housing units at a location Taylor’s Lane in his constituency will be densely packed into a small area with monolithic layout and design reminiscent of Ballymun or Eastern Europe.
The above is a microcosm of government lockdown inaction and support for vulture funds and bad practice a housing policy model that has devastated and broken the housing market.
Perhaps our economy itself is being dismantled and given into the hands of a plutocracy (government by the wealthy) served by a population of willing serfs controlled by a growing technocracy.
Let’s leave such speculation aside for the moment. We’ll pass on the bill to coming generations.
Its clear a new economic model little to do with the laws of supply and demand more to do with the rules of experimenting with laws of increasing social control and removal of liberties removing the rights of individuals to prosper and flourish economically in a free, capitalist society.
Under Covid 19 Socialism beckons and authoritarianism rules.
We need suspension of disbelief to grasp how ludicrous some of our new regulations due to Covid have become. Political parties in Ireland fully support NPHET no matter how bizarre their increasing demand for more lockdowns have become. The DUP in NI have come under increasing attack due to their opposition to so-called medical advice to extend and increase lockdown to the detriment of the economic well being of individuals and their jobs.
As we drift towards a dystopian future fed by Varadkars nonsense to travellers they should avoid making travel plans until December, dramatically illustrating the view government is in its own NPHET bubble cut off from reality, a failure to grasp that the public do indeed plan ahead unlike government. Many have already booked their return to Ireland for Xmas.
An Taoiseach Michael Martin a fan of NPHET if ever there was one, is intent on dictatorial, lockdown of our economy and lockdown of the best practice of government ‘of the people, for the people in favour of extremist NPHET ideology that’s misguided and ill informed with direct evidence so far of its blunt lockdowns unable to stem the tide of Covid-19’s devastating health and economic consequences for Ireland.
A future beckons bringing serfdom to our young, greater centralised power and control with a future global technocracy, greater digital surveillance, resources allocated using new data collection technologies to control the world and a dystopian future, the end of democracy. We should be concerned.
Distributed and controlled bailouts based on technocratic control limiting freedoms will decide whether you can travel, communicate with others or even what status you have in society.
Covid has already dealt a blow to democracy in the USA with its postal voting ending Trump’s populist efforts to obstruct the tide of Covid tyranny drowning democracy. Brexit will this week see renewed attacks of the UK governments efforts to restore the independence of its own waters from pillage by the EU. We’ve handed our own waters free gratis to the EU. Lack of our own sovereignty make it difficult if not impossible to address the issues raised above complicated as they are by our membership of the EU and what Michael Martin is being instructed to do by the invisible hand of the ECB.
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Colmbrazel's Blog 