Covid 19 Part XX-26,644 in ROI (1,772 deaths) 6,064 in NI (556 deaths) (08/08)Read OP

fritzelly wrote: »

The meat factories were doing private testing

Longing wrote: »

I don't even think the HSE had even had a test centre in Kildare before all this kicked off.

Stheno wrote:

O'Briens engaged a private test company to coordinate with the HSE

ACitizenErased wrote: »

The HSE coordinated all mass testing of nursing homes public and private. It's very very unusual.

Lyle wrote: »

Exactly, they were all immediately subsumed by public health for testing, as you would expect in all scenarios now as we carry on through the epidemic. I just can't see the sense in it outside of the companies involved not wanting to bring the HSA or whoever else down on them by referring employees to public health services for testing.

I hope somebody can get more info somewhere on this. Even if it's not actually anything sinister, it'd be nice to know what's going on. Or it would even be good to know that we have legitimate private backup capacity above the (alleged) 15,000 public capacity.

Wolf359f wrote: »

Tick on the 7 day average for cases. It's ticking upwards the past 2 weeks

ACitizenErased wrote:

I can't see any legitimate reason for outsourcing the testing. As far as I know, HSE handle all mass testing, and it is then sent to the NVRL. It doesn't matter if there's a testing centre in place or not. I swear the HSE warned before about not getting private tests?

Covid hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One day I was seeing people with appendicitis and kidney stones, the usual things you see in the emergency room. The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming in to the hospital was covid. Practically everyone who was tested had covid, regardless of what the presenting symtom was. People came in with a nose bleed and they had covid. They came in with stomach pain and they had covid.

Then, after a few months, all the covid patients disappeared. It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven’t seen a single covid patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative. At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of covid in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five people dying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no-one is getting infected any more.

In total covid has killed under 6,000 people in a country of ten million. A country with an annual death rate of around 100,000 people. Considering that 70% of those who have died of covid are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway. That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality.

That is why it is nonsensical to compare covid to other major pandemics, like the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people. Covid will never even come close to those numbers. And yet many countries have shut down their entire economies, stopped children going to school, and made large portions of their population unemployed in order to deal with this disease.

The media have been proclaiming that only a small percentage of the population have antibodies, and therefore it is impossible that herd immunity has developed. Well, if herd immunity hasn’t developed, where are all the sick people? Why has the rate of infection dropped so precipitously? Considering that most people in Sweden are leading their lives normally now, not socially distancing, not wearing masks, there should still be high rates of infection.

Covid has at present killed less than 6000 in Sweden. It is very unlikely that the number of dead will go above 7,000. An average influenza year in Sweden, 700 people die of influenza. Does that mean covid is ten times worse than influenza? No, because influenza has been around for centuries while covid is completely new. In an average influenza year most people already have some level of immunity because they’ve been infected with a similar strain previously, or because they’re vaccinated. So it is quite possible, in fact likely, that the case fatality rate for covid is the same as for influenza, or only slightly higher, and the entire difference we have seen is due to the complete lack of any immunity in the population at the start of this pandemic.

schmoo2k wrote: »

I did do that after I posted (and the post was a question) - still going to be interesting to see if it spikes again, or peters out...