We Didn’t Need Lockdowns; Rapid Testing Could Have Kept Society Open.
History will not be kind to them
I should start this piece with a clarification, so as to avoid any confusion about the intention behind it, or the analysis which follows. This is not a policy proposal. It is not an attempt to convince Ireland’s policymakers that a mass rapid testing program would produce better health outcomes than their current strategy, that […]
In February, 12 large Canadian companies joined forces to trial mass rapid testing in their workplaces as a potential route to the reopening of their business. In March, 5,000 people attended an indoor concert in Barcelona with the help of rapid antigen tests and only two infections were traced to the event. Universities in the […]
This is the second article of two that review NPHET’s decision to advise the Irish government against a border quarantine in February 2020. NPHET would later go on to reverse its position on the matter, but by that stage it was too late. The first wave was already well underway, and NPHET’s indecision at this […]
NPHET’s Advised Against Border Quarantines at the Start of The Outbreak – Part 1 On the 25th of February 2021, the Dáil voted to require all travellers coming to the country from high-risk regions to complete a mandatory 14 days of quarantine. A border quarantine is a standard public health policy in a period of […]
It has taken more than a year – one filled with of grief, suffering and misery across all cohorts of society – but the nation’s paper of record finally seems to be coming around to the idea that this never-ending catastrophe might have something to do with the secretive, unelected and unaccountable set of policymakers […]
10th of March 2020 – The Minister for Foreign Affairs appears on Morning Ireland. Gavin Jennings: “It looks like there are two choices – lock everything down before thousands become infected, or lock everything down after thousands become infected, like what’s happened in Italy. Why are we waiting to make more moves here? Simon Coveney: […]
A continent-sized land mass on the other side of the world might not seem like an obvious target for a comparative analysis. Australia’s glorious weather and the diversity of its often-terrifying wildlife also set it apart. As does the bloody-minded optimism of its natives which, while perhaps an evolved response to both of the aforementioned […]
What is ‘Excess Deaths’? The Excess Deaths statistic estimates the total mortality impact of a disease on a society. Excess Deaths tells us how many people died in excess of the number we would normally have expected over the same time period. It’s like the ‘real’ metrics that remove the effect of inflation from the observed economic […]
New Zealand is an island nation of about 5 million people. It is a western liberal democracy with public infrastructure and an advanced market economy. Like Ireland, New Zealand sits just off the coast of another larger island (admittedly about 4,000km off the coast, but we live in a globalised world) with which it is […]
My background is in investment risk management, particularly in the quantitative analysis of defined benefit pension scheme assets and liabilities. To put that in English: I’m a spreadsheet monkey. When I have a problem, and if I have enough time on my hands, I usually start with Microsoft Excel. Well, I’ve had a lot of […]