After the pandemic was largely over I was talking to a leading cardiologist who had been involved with a government, not ours, when the virus first hit and he said that when they first examined it, it scared the life out of them, they had never seen anything like it. Subsequently I was reading how a doctor who had been involved with SARS, which for the record had a death rate of 13%, recognised the similarities but what really scared him at the time was the transmissability of Covid. Sars died out as testing and tracing and isolation eventually starved it, this was not going to happen with Covid. I am not even sure what the first version of Covid was but its not what we have today. Omnicrom was the one that perhaps became the last version before everything opened up and before that we had delta. The studies on both at the time was that both had the same death rate for people with existing pre conditions however the important difference was the age criteria as Omnicrom the age was much higher. Therefore younger people were less impacted. For anyone to say that it was no worse than the flu all along, well they are ignoring the facts of the evolution of the virus. In a way the world go a pass with Covid as there was no guarantee that Omnicrom would come along, it could easily have went the other way, had this been a SARS with the same transmission ability, I am sure some of us would not be here today. Data from the OECD would show that Ireland did not suffer excess deaths in that period but overall the OECD had an excess of 5%. Thoes stats do not make any attempt to say where the deaths came from or attribute cause, its a mathematical model. Perhaps over the two year period with the age profile some of the people woukd have died anyway. Oddly enough we have had one of the highest excess death rates in the EU since then - is what happened during Covid linked? No idea. However using these stats to say it was all a hoax also ignores the facts that the quarantine measures in Ireland were followed as society accepted it was something that needed to be done. It would be like having a car crash while wearing a seat belt, walking away uninjured claiming the seat belt had nothing to do with it. Some people it would seem will never be convinced unless you recreate the crash while not wearing it. The vaccines were and are safe to take. While not tying to diminsih the impact that Covid had on people and their loved ones, the next time the world may not be so lucky.