I want to illustrate a crucial point on why we have so many cases not leading to as many hospital admissions or death.

This will dismantle anyone pushing a false premise that the virus is weaker, when all global evidence shows otherwise:

The spurious argument made by many disingenuous types is that the virus has weakened and their evidence for that is the lack of hospital admissions or deaths.

So lets look at 2 periods and see if we spot anything that changed:

August 1st - August 24th
April 1st - April 24th

By age, August 1st to August 24th:

0-4: 73 cases
5-14: 142 cases
15-24: 392 cases
25-34: 455 cases
35-44: 337 cases
45-54: 269 cases
55-64: 155 cases
65+: 101 cases (65-74: 58 / 75-84: 33 / 85+: 10)

What we see here:

-73% of new cases under 45
-5% of new cases over 65

By age, April 1st to April 24th:

0-4: 73 cases
5-14: 147 cases
15-24: 936 cases
25-34: 2,319 cases
35-44: 2,491 cases
45-54: 2,722 cases
55-64: 2,368 cases
65+: 3,758 cases

What we see here:

-40% of new cases under 45
-60% of new cases over 45, with
-25% of new cases over 65

Nothing about Covid19 has 'weakened'. There's tens of thousands dying globally every week.

What massively changed in Ireland and in parts of Europe, is older people are protecting themselves - and being protected by young people.

Now, in August, 1-in-every-20 new cases is over 65-years-old.

That's excellent and if we maintain that through the winter, not many older people will die.

The problem is that becomes increasingly harder to do when general infection in society rises.

When you think of where old people are - hospitals, nursing homes, their own homes - those settings are all best protected when there's not a big pool of community infection.

But when there is that increasing pool, each of those settings becomes statistically more vulnerable.

What we need to do, as a society, is make life easier for nurses, home carers, teachers (at all levels of life from creche to University).

There's only one way to do that, which is diligence on all being asked of us - cough into elbow, wash hands, mask up, avoid big crowds.

What the staff are doing in nursing homes is excellent.

In the last 5 weeks, there have been 8 clusters in nursing homes in Ireland, with 22 cases across those clusters.

That's 4 cases a week in the country. They can't do any more than they are doing.

If I could personally go into other settings like sandwich factories, meat plants, mushroom plants, DP centers, building sites and make them safer places, I'd do it.

I can't, so I focus on what I can achieve by trying to do my own part and trying to inspire others to do theirs.

This winter we can help make all these places safer, if we can reduce community infection.

This virus isn't any weaker, it's not going away and it will still kill lots of people.

In the words of Paul O' Connell in his 2009 Lions speech:

"We don't let it happen lads".