Irishman78621 wrote on Nov 23
rd, 2021 at 12:36am:
Thanks for the welcome. I was worried I would be seen as an outsider poking my nose in.
Ireland is a bit unique economically as a lot of internet based businesses have their European sites here, like ebay and amazon, so our economy is doing pretty well. However small businesses are being trashed. With more people working from home restaurants in the city centre have no lunchtime trade and many people don't want to go out and socialise even when there are no restrictions.
I know historically in Ireland the government has played a strong role in disease control. Until the sixties there was still a lot of TB in Dublin. The government would lockdown whatever was necessary, but people say they did not go overboard. They would try just to lockdown the building an infected person lived in, but if necessary they would lock down the street or streets around. They had to do that to stop people getting TB. There is acutally a guy in Dublin with a really infective strain of TB and he has been in Quarantine since 1960 something. Should the government just let him out to infect all Ireland and maybe even the world? I know here and in America in the late 1800s there were localised lockdowns around docks when there was an outbreak of the plague although the plague was not as strong as it had been. If you look at the godfather films people going into America had to have health checks and if necessary be quarantined. I would guess there were similar situations with TB etc. in Australia. Traditionally governments have always had to apply public health measures. I think just in recent decades we have been lucky and there were no major outbreaks so we all got complacent.
The Irish government puts huge resources into disease control in animals. Recently there was an outbreak of some Newcastle virus in chickens in one county and the police were at the county border checking peoples sandwiches to see if they had chicken in them. The government do that to protect the economy. Measures are needed to protect human health too.
I am afraid I have to disagree with Aquascot. Even if I prevent myself getting coronavirus if the government does not control Coronavirus I cannot get into a hospital if I need cancer treatment or a transplant, God forbid I should need them. Thats leaving economics out of it.
It seems to me that disease prevention is synomous with a strong economy. Some of the wealthiest cities in Europe, Milan and Venice, had strong public health measures to mitigate the plague. If people moved there from villages outside they could never go back to see their families. During this time these cities became very wealthy. On the other hand Lithuania had a huge amount of the plague and today it is still one of the less well off countries. Surly a healthy population is more productive than a sick one.
I know it is rough if an Australian in the UK wants to return to Australia and they have to spend two weeks in isolation but life has always been tough. In the 1940s Irish people had to go to England during the war to work in factories and many of them were bombed. Life has always been though. I think we just had a few lucky decades. I don't know too much about it but I would imagine if the isolation procedure had been more efficient Australia could have avoided the last outbreak. Surely that is what the government should have worked on.
I think a lot of governments around the world are mistaken in believing that playing down coronavirus will make them popular in elections. Angel Merkel in Germany talked about herd immunity and did nearly everything to keep borders open and she got hammered in the last election. The other conservative party which were anti-lockdown also got hammered. In France the ruling party did very badly in local elections and I think a lot of the reason Donald Trump lost in America is the coronavirus.
I am predicting that if we do not achive zero covid in Ireland, some Carribean country will implement zero covid and many of the wealthy elite will move there and spend their money there. It's people like that who eat in restaurants a lot and pay someone to do their garden.
According to Irish health officials if we still had the original strain of coronavirus with out high rate of vaccination we would have completely no coronavirus now but because we left new stains in we are not much better off than we were in March 2020. The virus is continuing to get stronger all the time.
thats sort of the whole point.
50 years ago when grandma with dementia got pneumonia, the sensible family doctor, and the sensible family did not think that arranging a helicopter to fly her from southern germany to an italian ICU was a sensible option.
now we do.
what happened?
i have been to nursing homes and seen old people coiled up in the fetal position, in nappies, drooling, unresponsive, with nurses dressed in masks and gowns for fear they should give them covid.
and if they did get covid, we have politicians and virtue signallers crying crocodile tears .
and fake outraged children saying their parents (who they visited once a year) have been murdered.
if i let one of my animals linger like that i would be in handcuffs facing charges from the RSPCA.
now lets not forget that the number of over 80 yo's will quadruple in 15 years.
do you really think we have correct priorities .
its time for that conversation
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