# Cabinet announced new measures (18-Aug-20)



## odyssey06 (18 Aug 2020)

All outdoor events will be limited to fifteen people, down from 200, under strict new limits on public gatherings agreed by cabinet this afternoon.

Under the restrictions, that will remain in place *until 13 September at the earliest*, indoor events will be limited to six people - reduced from 50 - except for businesses likes shops and restaurants which are subject to separate rules.

Weddings will be exempted from the new restrictions, meaning they can go ahead with fifty people.

The measures agreed by cabinet will mean that matches and other sporting fixtures will have to take place behind closed doors.

Gardaí will be given new powers to enforce rules around social gatherings, particularly in restaurants or bars serving food, and in private homes.

Under the measures agreed by cabinet, people will be advised to work from home and to avoid using public transport, unless absolutely necessary.


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## odyssey06 (18 Aug 2020)

More details:
- All visits to homes will be limited to six people from outside the home from no more than 3 households both indoors and outdoors.
- Outdoor gatherings will be limited to 15 people
- Religious services and businesses, such as shops and restaurants, are subject to separate rules than the above
- Restaurants and cafes can remain open with mandatory restrictions on closing times of 11:30pm
- Sports events and matches will revert to behind closed doors with strict avoidance of social gatherings before and after events.
- Indoor and outdoor training should follow the six indoor and 15 outdoor guidance.









						New Garda powers and tighter restrictions on gatherings as Ireland sees 190 Covid-19 cases
					

All these restrictions will apply until September 13




					www.irishexaminer.com


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## odyssey06 (18 Aug 2020)

Gyms can remain open, but no more than six people will be alllowed in an exercise class at any given time.


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## odyssey06 (18 Aug 2020)

Legislation will be introduced to enable the gardaí to immediately close down any pub or facility abusing the public health measures.   

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said that Government will consider the issue of the general reopening of pubs at the end of August.


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## EmmDee (18 Aug 2020)

Has anybody seen what date these start from... Is it from this evening?


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## odyssey06 (18 Aug 2020)

EmmDee said:


> Has anybody seen what date these start from... Is it from this evening?



Good q. I assumed midnight but it hasnt been stated.


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## Sophrosyne (18 Aug 2020)

They take effect immediately.


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## EmmDee (18 Aug 2020)

Sophrosyne said:


> They take effect immediately.



Thanks. I asked because my kid is teaching at a kids summer camp thing. Assuming that gets cancelled so (more than 6 indoors / 15 outdoors)


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## Sunny (18 Aug 2020)

EmmDee said:


> Thanks. I asked because my kid is teaching at a kids summer camp thing. Assuming that gets cancelled so (more than 6 indoors / 15 outdoors)



There are so many contradictions and exceptions, I wouldn't assume anything. It will take them a month to clarify.


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## joe sod (18 Aug 2020)

They wont get it down to low levels again. people are now fed up of the whole thing after 5 months in and huge amounts of money already spent. The statistics are all over the place anyway and are not reliable, 200 sunday, 56 monday, 190 today. Unless you put the army on the streets you wont get that compliance again.


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## odyssey06 (18 Aug 2020)

joe sod said:


> They wont get it down to low levels again. people are now fed up of the whole thing after 5 months in and huge amounts of money already spent. The statistics are all over the place anyway and are not reliable, 200 sunday, 56 monday, 190 today. Unless you put the army on the streets you wont get that compliance again.



You expect the statistics to be the same everyday?
Its clear from the figures the general direction of cases increasing... something like 4th highest rate of increase in EU.
Daily blips are just an admin thing.

Its the increase trend that is real concern not the raw numbers. And the R number is now 1.6.
This virus can double week on week.


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## joe sod (18 Aug 2020)

odyssey06 said:


> Its the increase trend that is real concern not the raw numbers. And the R number is now 1.6.
> This virus can double week on week.


but the R number is based on the statistics, the statistics are based on the testing which is wholly inadequate anyway and not measuring the true infection rate (and I still dont trust the statistics anyway because I think manipulation is going on in what days they choose to enter them). The only reason the R number went up is because they had to do widespread testing in the factories and guess what they found coronavirus. Therefore there are probably alot of people that get mild coronavirus symptoms, say nothing. get better and are probably doing this because of the whole naming and shaming associated with it. They dont want to be blamed for causing clusters and this is just human nature.


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## odyssey06 (18 Aug 2020)

I dont think its the cases in factories or DP that spooks them as much as the other half of the cases that dont seem to have any connection to such clusters.
A large number of cases is one cluster is different risk to casea distributed around the country.
Both types of cases are on the rise.

I take point re not wanting to be 'blamed'. But people have probably been doing that since this started.


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## Leo (19 Aug 2020)

joe sod said:


> The only reason the R number went up is because they had to do widespread testing in the factories and guess what they found coronavirus.



Are you suggesting that recent testing has been misdirected? Do you think they were deliberately targeting testing to avoid clusters? The volume of testing hasn't changed (~100,000 per week with a running cost of €75M per month), it is primarily aimed at those showing symptoms and contacts of confirmed cases. The reason the R number is up is linked to the number of close contacts per confirmed cases rising. 



joe sod said:


> and are probably doing this because of the whole naming and shaming associated with it.



What naming and shaming?


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## EmmDee (19 Aug 2020)

joe sod said:


> but the R number is based on the statistics, the statistics are based on the testing which is wholly inadequate anyway and not measuring the true infection rate (and I still dont trust the statistics anyway because I think manipulation is going on in what days they choose to enter them).



It's becoming tiring - "the numbers aren't what I think there should be therefore there is a massive conspiracy happening". If you have anything concrete backing up your lack of trust, please include it. Otherwise it's just a case of not liking the numbers and wishful thinking that they were different.

Just FYI - look at reported numbers for any country. There is a repeated pattern of Sunday and Monday numbers being lower with a pop up on Tuesdays. Also, adjusted numbers get reported regularly where older cases get confirmed and added to the numbers. Do you think there might be an alternative, more straightforward, explanation than a coordinated manipulation effort?


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## joe sod (19 Aug 2020)

Leo said:


> Are you suggesting that recent testing has been misdirected? Do you think they were deliberately targeting testing to avoid clusters?


They were testing what was presented to them which was probably mostly negative , "the worried well", they were not going and doing testing at big enough volume in known problem areas like meat factories and direct provision centres and the link between meat factories and direct provision centres has not been broken. The R number is high because they were not picking up the actual infection rate previously whereas now they are picking some of it up because they have moved their detection to where the infection is. The  R number is just the detection it is not the actual infection.


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## Sunny (19 Aug 2020)

A 100,000 a week???? We have never tested that. We don't even have capacity for that. There has only been three days in the past weeks where we tested over 10,000 and the system wasn't able to cope fully. We have been on average testing less than 5,000 a day or 35,000 a week. We should have been testing factories, direct provision centres and other high risk settings including general community testing but instead we wound down the test and trace as the numbers fell. Now they are scrambling to get it going again.


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## Leo (19 Aug 2020)

joe sod said:


> "the worried well",



How were the worried well getting referred for testing?


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## Leo (19 Aug 2020)

Sunny said:


> A 100,000 a week????



That's what we're currently paying for anyway.


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## Sunny (19 Aug 2020)

Leo said:


> That's what we're currently paying for anyway.



Might be what we are paying for but we not doing it and haven't for months if we ever did. 



			https://www.hse.ie/eng/services/news/newsfeatures/covid19-updates/integrated-information-service-testing-and-contact-tracing-dashboard-18-august-2020.pdf
		


To decision to restrict testing to suspect cases referred by GP's while knowing we had high risk settings like Direct Provision and Factories needs to be explained. Why did it take a huge outbreak for them to carry out widespread testing? We have been hearing for months that we are behind other Countries and we can learn from their mistakes and see where they had problems. Clusters and Outbreaks in factories and direct provision centres were seen in plenty of other countries and we didn't do anything.


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## Sophrosyne (19 Aug 2020)

Where will the next major outbreak(s) that we should have known about be?


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## Leo (19 Aug 2020)

Sunny said:


> Might be what we are paying for but we not doing it and haven't for months if we ever did.



That's some difference!



Sunny said:


> Clusters and Outbreaks in factories <anip> were seen in plenty of other countries and we didn't do anything



When you have the industry bodies saying they're following best practice but still pushing for advance notice of inspections...


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## Sunny (19 Aug 2020)

Leo said:


> When you have the industry bodies saying they're following best practice but still pushing for advance notice of inspections...



I know. It's just crazy. Really got annoyed today when Eamonn Ryan said that their test and trace system got caught off guard when the numbers started rising. We went through months of a lockdown to enable them to avoid a surge in the health system and give them time to build a test and trace system that worked. Instead they wound the system down as numbers fell. We should have been using the testing capacity whatever the cost. I presume it was a money saving exercise which makes no sense as we spend millions on keeping large parts of the economy closed.


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## joe sod (19 Aug 2020)

Sunny said:


> We went through months of a lockdown to enable them to avoid a surge in the health system and give them time to build a test and trace system that worked. Instead they wound the system down as numbers fell.


As far as I know the whole testing and tracing system is internal to the public service, only using state laboratories. Surely they could subcontract this out to the private sector aswell, any competetant science graduate could do the test, afterall its mostly mechanistic and repeatable, once you can do one you can do a thousand, the most important component is the chemical reagant, its not like looking an x ray


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## Leo (20 Aug 2020)

joe sod said:


> As far as I know the whole testing and tracing system is internal to the public service, only using state laboratories.



The HSE numbers show the current system has a capacity of ~100,000 tests a week, the real question is why they are using less than a third of that on most days. They have said a 'significant' number of close contacts are refusing to engage with the testing process, and many more fail to show up for the second test, but that can't be in the thousands per day.


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## demoivre (20 Aug 2020)

odyssey06 said:


> You expect the statistics to be the same everyday?
> Its clear from the figures the general direction of cases increasing... something like 4th highest rate of increase in EU.
> Daily blips are just an admin thing.
> 
> ...



Using new case numbers as some kind of barometer for measuring the effectiveness of policies against COVID19 is pointless because so few tests are carried out. Even if 100k tests a day are carried out you have no idea how many others have or haven't got the virus, or had it previously. So you absolutely can't conclude, even though most do, that the virus is on the increase.
Draw your own conclusions from the charts below as to how we're doing against COVID19.


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## Leo (20 Aug 2020)

demoivre said:


> Using new case numbers as some kind of barometer for measuring the effectiveness of policies against COVID19 is pointless because so few tests are carried out.



That really all depends on the consistency of the criteria being used to select people for testing. No scientific study tests entire populations or even large portions of them, but a sample size of thousands a day is more than enough to make reliable estimates of the overall population, provided the sample selection criteria are sound and consistent.


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## odyssey06 (20 Aug 2020)

demoivre said:


> Using new case numbers as some kind of barometer for measuring the effectiveness of policies against COVID19 is pointless because so few tests are carried out. Even if 100k tests a day are carried out you have no idea how many others have or haven't got the virus, or had it previously. So you absolutely can't conclude, even though most do, that the virus is on the increase.
> Draw your own conclusions from the charts below as to how we're doing against COVID19.



We're not randomly testing the people. We're testing the people reporting the symptoms of covid19.
The number of GP referrals, number of cases, the number of hospitalisations, ICU admissions and deaths are all part of the equation.
Just looking at hospitalisations won't tell you if there are large numbers of under 45s infected.
If there's a  large number of under 45s infected now, important to know that for community transmission to vulnerable groups.


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## joe sod (20 Aug 2020)

odyssey06 said:


> If there's a large number of under 45s infected now, important to know that for community transmission to vulnerable groups.



This trend has been happening for a while that under 45s are socializing much more and are being infected yet no big increase in hospital admissions, the same trend all over Europe. In fairness it can get out of hand like in Spain but they had bars nightclubs and music open, no fear of that here since most of these still absolutely shut. 
We are not getting to zero cOvid, there seem to be a few influential people in nphet that are a bit delusional about achieving this. We don't have the state infrastructure to do it, New Zealand uses army to enforce quarantine, not a chance of that happening here.


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## Sunny (20 Aug 2020)

joe sod said:


> This trend has been happening for a while that under 45s are socializing much more and are being infected yet no big increase in hospital admissions, the same trend all over Europe. In fairness it can get out of hand like in Spain but they had bars nightclubs and music open, no fear of that here since most of these still absolutely shut.
> We are not getting to zero cOvid, there seem to be a few influential people in nphet that are a bit delusional about achieving this. We don't have the state infrastructure to do it, New Zealand uses army to enforce quarantine, not a chance of that happening here.



Yeah getting a bit fed up of the comparisons with New Zealand. We are one of the most open economies in the world and part of the largest single market in the world. New Zealand are over 4k KM's from their largest trading partner and only large neighbouring Country. The idea of having zero covid is nonsense while covid exists. Even when there is a vaccine, we will have to live with Covid. NZ won't be able to keep doing what they are doing with regard to borders and quanantine for years so even they will have learn to live with it again.


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## demoivre (20 Aug 2020)

Leo said:


> That really all depends on the consistency of the criteria being used to select people for testing. No scientific study tests entire populations or even large portions of them, but a sample size of thousands a day is more than enough to make reliable estimates of the overall population, provided the sample selection criteria are sound and consistent.



The majority of tests done are on symptomatic cases even though 80%+ of  cases are asymptomatic. Who is ringing their GP to organize for a test if they feel fine? The questions in the Covid app are clearly designed to identify symptomatic cases. Rising case numbers, based on a severely biased sample, does not allow one to deduce that the virus is spreading.


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## demoivre (20 Aug 2020)

odyssey06 said:


> We're not randomly testing the people. *We're testing the people reporting the symptoms of covid19.*



Exactly, and that's the problem. We are ignoring, in the main, the 80% of cases that are asymptomatic. We cannot therefore conclude that because symptomatic cases may be rising that all cases are rising.


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## Sunny (20 Aug 2020)

demoivre said:


> The majority of tests done are on symptomatic cases even though 80%+ of  cases are asymptomatic. Who is ringing their GP to organize for a test if they feel fine? The questions in the Covid app are clearly designed to identify symptomatic cases. Rising case numbers, based on a severely biased sample, does not allow one to deduce that the virus is spreading.



It's a fair point. We saw large jumps in case numbers when complete factories were tested including asymtomatic cases. The only reason these people were tested even when they weren't considered close contacts was that the pressure on stopping these clusters was growing. However, these asymptomatic cases might always have been there and just never identified so we can't say for sure that the virus is spreading out of control compared to a month ago...


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## odyssey06 (20 Aug 2020)

demoivre said:


> The majority of tests done are on symptomatic cases even though 80%+ of  cases are asymptomatic. Who is ringing their GP to organize for a test if they feel fine? The questions in the Covid app are clearly designed to identify symptomatic cases. Rising case numbers, based on a severely biased sample, does not allow one to deduce that the virus is spreading.



The sample has always been biased towards the symptomatic.
If we are seeing more symptomatic people testing positive, it is reasonable to conclude that cases are on the rise.
There could be some small scale distortions caused by clusters which lead to testing of asymptomatic people.
But we have always tested asymptomatic close contacts of confirmed cases.
And we have no reason to think that the overall percentages would be significantly different between July & August.
NPHET are quite clear in their briefings about breaking down cases by cluster, community transmission etc
They pay attention to the number of outbreaks as well as the number per outbreak.

It's not 100% definitive, but it seems a reasonable shorthand. 
If you can think of some other feasible mechanism that would give a more definitive answer, please explain.


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## Leo (20 Aug 2020)

demoivre said:


> The majority of tests done are on symptomatic cases even though 80%+ of cases are asymptomatic.



It's a lot more than that though, there are hardly up to 10k symptomatic cases every day? Testing all close contacts of identified cases should capture a lot of the asymptomatic cases.


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## SPC100 (21 Aug 2020)

Do you have a source stating 80p.c. are asymptomatic i.e. never get symptoms.

I thought many of those turned out to be presymptomatic.


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## odyssey06 (22 Aug 2020)

SPC100 said:


> Do you have a source stating 80p.c. are asymptomatic i.e. never get symptoms.
> I thought many of those turned out to be presymptomatic.



Yes the figures are 80% mild or asymptomatic. Mild meaning medical treatment not required.
I don't think I've seen figures broken down for those who never develop symptoms.

This article suggests fully asymptomatic is only 30%:


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## odyssey06 (28 Aug 2020)

The Cabinet have approved new powers for Gardai to shut down pubs who flout health guidelines.
No new powers re: house parties yet:

The first will allow gardaí to issue a compliance notice to a pub owner, which will ask them to address any issues there.
Gardaí will have two options if this does not happen.
One is to use an Immediate Closure Order that would shut the pub for a day and if this did not occur, the bar's owners would face a fine of up to €2,500 or a six-month prison sentence.
Gardaí will also be able to apply to the District Court for an Emergency Closure Order, which could close a pub for up to 30 days.









						Cabinet agree legislation on stronger powers for gardaí
					

The Cabinet has agreed legislation that would give gardaí the power to shut pubs that are not adhering to public health guidelines.




					www.rte.ie


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