Coronavirus in ROI/NI part 2

[Zantedeschia]

Following on from the other thread

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/craicnet/3834552-Coronavirus-in-Ireland-N-Ireland?pg=40&order=

Ryan Tubridy did when I lived there, I used to see him with his kids on the street from time to time. No idea if he still does.

It's actually quite small. The supermarket was a bit shit and so were the chemists. But the pubs were really nice with lovely food. But in hindsight it was a bit small and clannish and very West Brit. I went to midnight mass there one year in a fit of Catholic guilt, and the GLAMOUR!

Then a Starbucks opened there and people were aghast!

There was a massive campaign in Crosshaven, just down from the Royal Cork Yacht Club, when there was planning in for a supermarket. They got a nice Centra, which I think they accepted. Derval O'Rourke lives in Crosser. There was horror when Lidl arrived in Kinsale - Keith Floyd used to live there.
I don't live in either!

Just went for a run. Loads of people out walking. Lovely to see. I live in a rural town so plenty of space to keep distance.
I will never have ice-cream before I run again though, I may be seeing it again soon. It was a last minute decision, I felt a headache coming on(prob from the icecream) thought fresh air might help. It was meant to be a walk but I ran instead. Felt so good. All the cows were in the fields and the lambs. I am lucky I live where I do. Took me a while to appreciate it though. I lived in Dublin for years but my son wanted to live here near his granny and Grandad. So I moved back here and I hated it for years. Now I absolutely love it.

Ryan Tubridy lives in Monkstown now, by wierd coincidence I saw him out for a walk about half an hour ago when I was queuing outside Avoca! That's a good spot for people watching, last time I saw Cillian Murphy with his Labrador.
Dalkey is lovely but there's no Avoca.

We thought we saw Matt Damon at the weekend but it was just another middle aged dad in baggy shorts, hoodie and cap. Anyway, even if you do bump into him in SuperValu you'd have to pretend not to recognise him, you wouldn't want him to get too full of himself 😂

I have a crush on Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy, Hugh Jackman and Jason M who's surname I cant spell.

Were you doing a weekly shop in Avoca? Now that would be living our best life. Dh gets pickled peppercorns in Avoca, I think our closest one is Rathcoole, which is a long way from Cork. He bulk buys them.
Cillian Murphy's cousin used to work on the checkout in my local Super Valu.

The Avoca in Monkstown is small, I doubt that you could do your weekly shop there- unless you eat a lot of their ready meals through the week.

He figures for Covid19 are pretty bad today.

Highest number of deaths reported in a single day

I really hope that's them catching up the outside hospital deaths that are lagging behind. I think it'll be this day next week before we know for sure whether numbers are dropping.

But the new infection rate is down.

Are we testing properly now, have we got the reagent?

I think the German lab results are all in now, they seem to be taking a lot of tests in nursing homes, residents and staff

That’s a really high number, is that not approaching the UK numbers at their height on a per capita basis (except Irish numbers aren’t just limited to hospital deaths) It seems that the UK numbers are on the way down whereas ours are still on the way up.

Yes, testing is going full scale now; apparently they are going to test every nursing home resident. That'll give us all a very good idea as to whether we can get it under control.

What we really need are the instant blood tests; they don't exist, but when they do and we can do a quick finger prick and get a result in half an hour instead of 24 or 48 hours, that'll be a game changer.

I read, maybe in the Irish Times earlier or on Twitter, that there are now test results from post mortems coming through - so people who died without being diagnosed.
I had a relation die in England whose post mortem took a lot longer than an Irish one would - I assume that would also affect the speed at which covid deaths were reported.

Is no one else dispirited at such a large number so many days after lockdown? I felt really dispirited last night. I think it certainly shows we should not be comparing ourselves to other countries until this whole thing is over - before that it is too early to say how we are doing/did.

I even just worked it out - that’s the equivalent of 936 deaths if we were the same size as the UK and I was shocked at how blasé people were on here when those numbers were reached. But it seems to be the same in Ireland? I guess people just get desensitized to the numbers?

I think that's true eggandonion. They showed a slide yesterday that I can't find online with the dates on which the people who were announced yesterday died, and a few were over a week old.

Bedroom, if they are catching up with historical deaths, and reporting is becoming more efficient, then this will be a blip of a couple of days, and it should drop more quickly next week.

Another possible explanation (anecdotal, so feel free to ignore) is that some people were put on ventilators relatively early on who probably shouldn't have been. Some have been ventilated for a number of weeks with no improvement, and decisions are having to be made about them.

So if you count both those possibilities, the people announced to have died yesterday probably mostly were infected before lockdown.

It is working, and testing and contact tracing is being extended. Another couple of weeks of this (if people can stick it out) and we will have a very good handle on it, and hopefully be able to trace every case and keep new infections low even when we get out and about more.

The problem with the UK is that they aren't tracing at all, nor are they testing very much, so they have no idea how many in the community have it. They also aren't including any out-of-hospital deaths; if their numbers included (as ours do) the probable extra 50% who are dying in care homes, they would have had almost 1500 a day for a couple of weeks.

Yesterday was one day; today may be bad, then I expect it to go down - fingers crossed.

I think gavan Reilly has the graph on twitter. My phone and I are incapable of links.

Yesterday I was shocked at the number of deaths. It was the first time since the numbers started getting high that I was shocked. I cant wait until we have 0 deaths but that'll prob never come, even with a vaccine as we have a vaccine for flu but still people die.
Starting to feel like there is no end in sight. I dont think I've slept right since this started. I'm not s great sleeper anyway but it's worse now, with all the lack of activity, routine and eating junk food.

Some of those are old deaths though.

I think they're going to be more accurate numbers released on Thursday with the deaths placed back to their actual dates of death. They didn't have time yesterday.

The median death is still fairly old, it's definitely the nursing homes.

For example on Friday my ICU only had 2 people in it and the Covid ward only had 6 people in it. So in terms of hospital admissions we're seeing a big improvement. But obviously the nursing homes have now become the focus of the entire fight. They're talking now about putting HSE nursing staff into private nursing homes.

After this is all over I want to see what proportion of private homes were affected compared to public nursing homes.

We are doing great. Dont be disheartened. We are in a great position with testing and our figures are real. Keep going.

Yes they did say that some of those deaths old and not from a single day, but the over all death toll is still high.
I've been reading back newspaper reports from Dec and Jan about an unusual high number of people being admitted to hospital for flu, I think it was 2000 or something which sort gets me wondering are we all right when we say that Covid 19 has been here since Dec.
A lot of people I know my sister included, were very sick with flu like symptoms, they all said they struggled to breath, high temp, sore throat.
We had a lot of children sick before and after our Christmas break too.

I agree with NewAccount, although the numbers yesterday were awful, when you look behind them there was some 'catching up' from previous weeks which made it seem worse than it actually is. Having said that, each 'number' is an actual person with a story and a family, and it seems terrible to reduce them to 'numbers'.

With regards to the U.K., they have made an absolute hames of it, as my mother used to say. Not only are they not testing, which makes their 'number of cases' statistics meaningless, as they really have no idea how many cases there are. This is impacting on us, as it's thought to be one of the reasons why there are so many cases in Letterkenny and Cavan hospitals beside the border. Gabriel Scally keeps repeating that we need an 'All Ireland' approach if we are going to get on top of it.

One of the other things I find so strange about the U.K. is that many hospitals seem to have capacity yet people who are really ill with CV are left at home with only a phone call to their GP as care. That has to be a factor in their death rate. It seems that Germany kept their death rate low by whipping people into hospitals early on in the infection, and getting them on oxygen so they made an earlier recovery without needing ventilation. The survival rate after ventilation in only 50/50 so surely you'd want to avoid as many as possible getting to that stage.

For us, we do seem to have a handle on it, if we can get a grip of the nursing home situation. We need to be testing and contact tracing to capacity and that does seem to be increasing.

The difficulty is what to do next. I don't envy the government trying to work out how to ease up on the lockdown without causing another spike. At least we can watch and learn from other countries who are loosening restrictions now.

I see the cabin fever getting to people, there are a lot more out and about, it's so hard for children and teens, particularly, separated from their friends for so long. It's hard to know how long people will be able to keep this up as summer comes.

@eggandonion Avoca is only for treats!

The butcher there is very good, I'm a veggie, so is DH and DS, but 3 of my dc are committed carnivores , so I was queuing up for that. And custard tarts. And who ever left an Avoca without a box of rice Krispy squares!

Our whole lives revolve around food now, everyone looks forward to dinner so much. I've even started on the dreaded sourdough.