As the case definition is broadened and referrals are increased it is inevitable that the positivity rate will decrease so what Dr Cillian De Gascun should have said is “Because of the broadening of the case definition and increases in referrals the positivity rate has continued to decline. This indicates an increasingly accurate picture of COVID-19 in the community"As of midnight Monday 18 May, 295,626 tests have been carried out.
Over the past week, 36,818 tests were carried out and of these 932 were positive, giving a positivity rate of 2.5%.
Dr Cillian De Gascun, Chair of the NPHET Expert Advisory Group, said: “Despite broadening the case definition and increases in referrals the positivity rate has continued to decline. This indicates a consistent suppression of COVID-19 in the community.”
See that's the problem right there; If you are fit (not fat and no underlying conditions) and under 65 there is almost no chance of it killing you, or even making you very sick. There are limited resources available for the longer term fight against this disease so rather than wasting them by adopting policies which assume that everyone is equally at risk we should conserve them by targeting them at those who are at risk.et's not lose sight that Covid-19 is a killer and wants to kill you. Forget about age, class, etc we need to keep battling Covid-19.
I'm still going to work. We are as busy as ever. This has had no financial impact on me. I have family members who are high risk. I'm not suggesting that things go back to normal; normal will be different from now on no matter what we do.Purple I think your anxiety to get things back to normal, whilst perfectly understandable, is leading you to making definitive statements which are premature I feel.
Right now it may be true that the predominant pattern of this virus is that it is targetting the elderly and those with underlying conditions. However there are also warnings starting to come out of a possible link between the virus and kawasaki disease that may be very serious for younger people. As we learn more, there may be further concerns. The bottom line is we simple do not know enough to make definitive statements at this point in time. Our government may well be overly cautious in their approach but forgive me if I side with an over cautious leadership rather than a reckless one like in the US - there is no time for regrets when someone dies.
I appreciate I am saying this from the position of someone who still has his job so we have been largely unaffected by this. I can fully understand those who want to get back to work and get things going again. In fact there is every chance that these next few months may be the calm in this storm and there is an argument that we should all be trying to do as much over the summer as possible to enjoy ourselves before severe restrictions are reintroduced (possibly even more severe next time). There is a very real chance that this thing will kick off in a second wave come September and coming into the winter - and it may be much worse in the second wave.
So I do get the sentiment here, I just feel we need to be careful about making definitive statements because none of us really know how this thing will go from here.
Yep, there's meant to be a branch of medical science called epidemiology (invented in China in the 16th century) which, along with Statisticians and outbreak mapping (like that done by the Gates Foundation in its fight against Polio) should, at this stage, be giving us a good picture of spread, infection rates, mortality rates, recovery rates and who exactly the at-risk groups are.One thing I don't understand when people talk about second waves is how we don't know this is the second wave? France have confirmed that they had cases back in December. I think it would be pretty unlikely that France is alone in that so this virus could have been living in the community since the end of last year. So instead of being on time with imposing restrictions, we could actually be months late. We have no idea how many people got the virus and either didn't get sick or just put it down to the flu. And now we could be delaying lifting the restrictions unnecessarily.
We can only go by the figures provided and they seem to confirm that all new cases are coming from meat factories and residential settings. There are very little cases in the general community. At this stage with 60 cases a day, the majority of the Country must be virus free. Of course, the alternative is that our testing approach is completely wrong and we don't know what the true picture of the virus in the general population is. Either way as Purple says, borrowing 30,000,000,000 this year is a serious cost that people are entitled to question at this stage. I can understand waiting to see what happens in other Countries that open up but we are paying a lot of money to use other Countries as lab rats.....
I agree but the elephant in the room is the utter inability of the organs of the State to deliver a project like this efficiently.It is evident to anyone out and about that many people are moving ahead of the Government's glacial plan to ease the lockdown.
IF testing/tracing is finally in place, as claimed, then we need a revised fast-track plan to the new normal. And they should get on with forming a new Government while their at it to add some ligimitacy to the curbing of people's freedoms.
Has anyone got a link to recent data on the breakdown of deaths from Covid19 here?
As of the 8th of May the data was that 950 of the 1600 people who had died in this country were over 80 (650 of those over 85) and only 30 people under the age of 44 had died. I'm not seeing those breakdowns anymore.
One thing that I’ve found consistently misleading is the use of the “median age” (of those who died) as opposed to the “mean age” or “average age”.
Has anyone got a link to recent data on the breakdown of deaths from Covid19 here?
As of the 8th of May the data was that 950 of the 1600 people who had died in this country were over 80 (650 of those over 85) and only 30 people under the age of 44 had died. I'm not seeing those breakdowns anymore.
How is it misleading?
Thanks for the link. Very interesting.That information is produced by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre
Data up to midnight June 5th [broken link removed]. See page 11, Table 8
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