24 Comments
Feb 11, 2022·edited Feb 11, 2022

You asked about known comorbities. While I can't get you the numbers for Norway, I can check the swedish intesive care registry. However, the text is all in swedish so I'll summarise the most common comorbidites if that's okay?

[https://www.icuregswe.org/data--resultat/covid-19-i-svensk-intensivvard/]

# of ICU patients stands at 8 914 patients from March 2020 to today.

Most common comorbidities (excluding advanced age) are given as:

chronic cardiac/lung disease 29.1%

chronic liver/kidney disease 6.8%

diabetes 25.2%

hypertoni 43.1%

The share of the total number of ICU patients having any comorbidity is stated as 80.6%.

To get more detailed data, one would have to work in health care to have access to more details (and if I had that I would not be allowed to share it publicly anyway due to patient/health care confidentiality) or to be a researcher appointed by legal authority to investigate and again not be allowed to share any data until the report was complete and approved for publication.

As Norway and Sweden are very much alike when it comes the health of the general indigenous population, the proportions in Norway should be similar to those in Sweden.

Thank you for your continuing coverage of the issue. Oh, by the by, some of our regime loyal media has reported that the death toll in Austria is so high that hospitals in Oberösterreich (their spelling) must stack corpses in corridors... Somehow, I find that a little hard to believe, not only because no named austrian source is given, not even the name of a hospital.

Expand full comment
author

Hi Rikard, thanks for the link and information--this is extremely helpful.

I agree with your premise, i.e., it would appear Sweden and Norway are very much comparable. One question here, and it's a minor detail: how widespred is the (ab-) use of 'snus' in Sweden ('snus' refers to small pouches of tobacco people often keep in their mouths in lieu of smoking, which is very expensive and socially frowned-upon)?

I also read the 'righ-risk' share of hospital and ICU admissions--which are 80+ % in Norway--as an indicator of both old age and a number of comorbidities. There's no such data available, though, but I suspect that at some point, this will also come to light: I mean--many people know retirement and/or nursing homes, hence it's obvious to even the most casual visitor that there's a huge number of frail and often very unhealthy people there.

What troubles me, in part, is the inverse relationship between the 97% of infections occurring among the 0-59yo vs. the 93% of bad outcomes--hospitalisation, ICU admission, and death--occurring among the 60+ cohorts.

Fully opening up economy and society for everyone appears a questionable idea, for it implies that more people in the former age cohorts will go and visit their relatives in the latter brackets, thereby potentially driving up infection rates--and thus bad outcomes as defined above--among the elderly. Alternatively, we could also continue to lock up our seniors, which is tantamount to a death sentence, too.

As to the fake news issue from Sweden: 'old fake news' (doesn't mean the older the vintage, the better the taste)--there was one such incident in Upper Austria in November (iirc), which was due to the conflation of limited personnel and storage facilities at one clinic, deaths occurring on a weekend, and the backlog this created. It was singular and Covidistan media covered this ad nauseam to prepare for the 'house arrest of the unvaccinated'. If you'd like to share that link, I'll write this up and we may have a vote on whether Covidistan (state) media is 'better' or 'worse' than Sweden's--deal? (Also, it reeks of the shenanigans that legacy media did last year; in addition, keep in mind that hospitals in Covidistan are quite empty by now…)

Expand full comment

About the use of snus, well it's more common than smoking among working class swedes I would say, especially outside Fjollträsk (Stockholm, it's nickname literally means "Swamp full of sissies").

The below leads to Swedish Match, /the/ major producer of snus and other tobacco products. It uses public data sources from Sweden, Denmark and Norway.

[https://www.swedishmatch.com/sv/Snus-och-halsa/Tobaksbruk/Tobaksbruk-i-siffror/]

Generally, snus is more common in Sweden while smoking is much more common in Denmark: the iconic old danish lady with her little glass of kirsberry licqueur and a cigarillo in a firm grip sitting in the sun outside a kro, well, my maternal grandmother was such a lady and you simply don't tell them what to do - you ask politely. That includes authorities, and the danish queen is the ultimate such lady, so they're pretty much stuck as they are. :)

This is from the central statistics agency, SCB:

[https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/artiklar/2018/farre-roker-fler-snusar/]

Also in swedish, based on yearly surveys from 1988 to 2017. Generally smoking is on its way out among swedes, especially men. Among migrants the reverse is true, though vaping is starting to make a real impact and will in the future be shown separately from smoking. The new-ish so-called "vitt snus" (white snuff) is also on the uptake. It's made from other plants than tobacco but has nicotine added in. The health-know it alls are already in a furore about it.

The news about putting the dead in the corridor is from local paper called Smålandsposten (liberal/farmer's unionist) and is part of a longer text about the onslaught on the virus in Germany and Austria during the fall last year. In the same text the fact that one patient had to be transferred to a hospital in Italy is implied as proof of how Covid cases are collapsing the health care system. Fearporn is to weak a term, really.

[https://www.smp.se/nyheter/smittan-harjar-i-europa-gar-mot-hemsk-jul-22460597/]

The headline in the link reads "The contagion ravages Europe; we are facing a bleak Yule". You'd think it was virus like the one in 'The Stand' or something doing the rounds.

Regarding the seniors, we've already been through the mass dying of them during 2020. As no extra safety features or hygiene procedures were implemented until mid-march 2020, the virus was already fully out and about among the employees. The below is from the official registry for causes of death:

[https://sdb.socialstyrelsen.se/if_dor/resultat.aspx]

Out of 9 441 dead from/with Covid during 2020, 8 580 were 70 years old or older. Data for how many of these were in nursing homes is not registred separately to my knowledge.

Tangent:

And publicly owned or financed nursing homes are a scandal in and of itself, often just being a place where you check someone into, hook them up to an IV drip, feeds them morphin and let them waste away and die in a couple of weeks, unless they have relatives able and willing to fight for them. A scandal not just because some nursing homes resemble the orphanges of Ceaucescu's Romania, but because many of them are part-owned by semi-retired politicians. Socialised losses and privatised profits is the name of the game here.

Expand full comment

On the issue of co-morbidities there is one thing that may be worth keeping in mind. Looking at UK data it appears that the number of people who died with COVID with previously undiagnosed co-morbidities is always '0'. This is really not possible and I think it means that in the UK (as in most other places) autopsies are not taking place whenever there was a COVID positive test. If this is correct, it is only logical to assume that co-morbidities have played a greater part in COVID deaths than reported, since not all co-morbidities will have been known before death and they are not being diagnosed after death in autopsies.

This may not play such a big role in Scandinavian countries where the health of the herd (sorry, the population) is thoroughly checked, but may be a greater issue in places like the US or UK

Expand full comment
author

I agree, that sounds…fishy, if not outright suspect.

While if may be as you say (I can't say for sure, I've never seen a UK death certificate), the argument proposed appears quite logical. That said, proving anything ex post will be tricky.

My 'guesstimate' is that while you may be right about the generally higher levels of healthy (better: not-too-sick) people in Scandinavia, I suspect that (more) 'privatised' systems such as the US will show these issues more openly.

In other words: 'socialised' healthcare tends to allow for greater levels of obfuscation by governments as the insurance pool is larger than, say, a megacorp whose pool isn't the entire population but a fraction of it.

If the injections are as bad (and making things progressively worse over time), we should see the tell-tale signs around before too long, perhaps as early as this summer, don't you think?

Expand full comment

Oberosterreich? I thought it was osterreich?

Expand full comment
author

Hi Tom, Oberösterreich (Upper Austria) is one of the nine federal states that make up the Republic of Austria. And it's a state governed by a conservative (ÖVP) + right-wing (FPÖ) coaliation, which is frequently at odds with the conservative-green federal gov't, which was also one of the confounding factors in that above-mentioned media piece last autumn.

Expand full comment

Thanks!

Expand full comment

And we are realeased. Infected kids can even go to school if fever free, so it is basically saying that we do not care anymore.

It would be hopeful if it was the first time it happens, but they actually did the same last September, and we got three months. I understand perfectly why they decided to close again, and I do not see why the situation is different this time.

Last September they thought that with everyone vaccinated with a "95% or more effective", if people caught it there would be no issues. We all saw that was not the case. Now they are expecting that after a recent omicron infection you have some form of immunity. There are reports already going around that that immunity is not obtained by vaccinated persons. I hope that is not the case in most cases because if not we are in for a big surprise.

Expand full comment

I have a vascular surgeon buddy who tells me that he is seeing new onset clotting issues in non-smokers in their 30s and 40s--all are vaccinated and tested negative for covid.

Expand full comment
author

Hmmm, that sounds…odd. On the other hand, it doesn't, esp. if one considers the still-unknown long-term effects of these injections.

May I ask (generally, i.e., state/country would be good, no specifics in terms of places, names, etc.) where your friend is located?

I'm in Scandinavia, and over here the gov't abrogated virtually all mandates as of 10 a.m. today (local time), incl. distancing and mask requirements, so this is 'good', but no-one really knows what the next months will bring in terms of injection 'after-life'.

Also, I'm not a MD or the like, but I'd suspect that since the injections make one's own cells produce the S protein, and since these S proteins kinda 'stick out' of the endothelia (i.e., the inner lining of blood vessels), that the clotting issues he or she is seeing are actually due to things that are roughly comparable to closed lanes on the motorways: less flow, more congestion (or: coagulation), irrespective of any kind of 'test' for Covid.

Did your friend perhaps tell you anything about the size of these clots? Are they, like, in the bigger vessels or are these occurring rather in the small-size capillaries?

Expand full comment

My buddy is in the US and travels to work in different cities in different states (Kentucky, Utah, Tennessee, Michigan). He says that the clots are weird--kind of stringy. I was reminded a clot that an embalmer--Richard Hirschman--pulled from a corpse and was showing us on a video.

Expand full comment
author

I saw that creepy and very disturbing video. You wouldn't know if that embalmer had these samples analysed with respect to the 'contents' (I guess) of these white-ish substances he pulled from the dead?

I know this sounds super-creepy, but I'd surely like to learn what this stuff is.

Expand full comment

Whilst the death rate in Norway is spiking, it is still nowhere near the levels of the UK etc

Expand full comment
author

That is true, and I guess it's a combination of Norway's less-demolished welfare state (which reduces anxiety among the lower rungs of the socio-economic distribution quite a bit relative to the UK) and the generally less-unhealthy population.

In addition, I'd caution against direct comparisons: the UK began its injection roll-out a bit earlier than Norway (where it began on 28 Dec. 2020), but I suspect the key driver is time elapsed sind the last injection, and the main consequences so far may have been avoided by offering a third injection.

In other words: getting an injection was a bad idea in the first place, but you cannot really stop taking these gene therapeutics because once you're hooked on them, the longer one elects to forego another injection, the worse one's individual risk of (re-) infection with Covid and/or serious consequences of either having a compromised immune system and/or repeated Covid infections will become.

If this is a quite apt hypothesis, this is bad enough for any individual who took/got/was illegally coerced into taking these mislabelled products, and eventual outcomes in terms of risk of severe illness, hospitalisation, and/or (earlier) death will vary along any number of variables, from one's general health to food (processed foodstuffs vs. cooked-at-home) and lifestyle 'choices' (active people vs. couch potatoes), and the like, incl., well, luck.

In terms of its presumed societal impacts, a mere aggregation of a couple of the above factors alone will provide us with a 'model', which will be quit inaccurate. While I don't think any of this is done (yet) outside perhaps a few intelligence operatives, I suspect that the models are so terrible that we the people will never be allowed to look at them.

I suspect our way forward will be: see no evil, hear no evil, and hope for the best.

Geez, I hope I'm wrong about this.

Expand full comment

Can you please have a look at the mortality statistics for Norway and see if there is excess mortality in the working age population like we see in the US?

Expand full comment
author

Hi Tom,

there's a wonderful piece by Joel Smalley who's already done this (in part): elderly residents are dying in excessive numbers since ± late August 2021:

https://metatron.substack.com/p/deaths-in-norway

I haven't yet seen anything like the dieoff among the working age cohorts you allude to. I haven't looked for it either, though, and I shall certainly keep my eyes open.

Expand full comment

Excellent write-up. Thank you.

Expand full comment
author

Oh, thank you--your pieces are an inspiration in all of this.

I still can't answer your question about the 'something's rotten in Norway' piece: why do deaths exceed the long-term mean from approx. late August 2021 onwards. I mean, I've chronicled these developments, but most of the fatalities don't seem (directly) related to all matters Covid-19, alghough I'd dare to express my gut feeling here: I think many of these fatalities are due to the injections and their suppression/reformatting of the immune system.

What I'd really like to see would be studies--data on end--that look into these matters; there are some indications, such as references to the Covid injections--and the S protein production they induce. I've seen a recent study that claims injection-induced Spike levels are about as high as among those who suffer from a severe course of the disease, hence here's my guess (as a non-physician or geneticist):

The Covid injections are quite literally a sneak attack on people's immune system, and in trying to deal with the fallout, our immune system goes all-in. Thus 'distracted', latent infections, viruses, germs, bacteria, cancer, and the like are having a much easier time to evade our immune reaction.

Now, even if that's an apt description of what's going on post-injection, it'll be a really tough thing to prove this beyond reasonable doubt (although given the rather peculiar 'signature' of Covid injections in, say, injected people's blood via the apparently changing electric charges of red blood cells, it might 'technically' be quite easy to prove at least 'correlation'), but, then again, given the real-world implications--gov'ts and public health authorities having sold this bill of goods (bads) to the population at-large for 1.5 years and counting--I'd imagine the political fall-out to be…formidable, if not insurmountable.

What do you think?

Expand full comment

Thanks for your detailed analysis, very informative. One question I have, and I apologize if I missed the information in the text body: what is the definition of ‘fully vaccinated’ there? Is one considered fully vaxed the moment they get the second shot, or two weeks after, as elsewhere?

Expand full comment
author

Hi Manu Rus,

good point--I only did so 'implicitly' by referencing an older piece. Here's the definitions according to the Norwegian IPH:

‘Partially vaccinated’: 1 jab, from 3 weeks after the 1st jab; 2 jabs, until 1 week after the second jab.

‘Fully vaccinated’: those who received 2 doses, from 1 week after the 2nd jab.

‘Fully vaccinated and boosted’: those who received a 3rd jab, from 1 week after the 3rd jab.

If you'd like to dive further into these matters, here's a link to an even older piece of mind discussing these, incl. references:

https://fackel.substack.com/p/about-these-norwegian-covid-updates

Would that do?

Expand full comment

Sure, thank you. I guess you understand my suspicion. It’s dubious to say the least that one is considered vaccinated some time after the actual shot instead of right then and there. I’m no vaccine specialist but I have never heard that being the case with ANY other vaccine.

Expand full comment
author

I agree, fully and completely, on this one. I,too, consider is both illogical and misleading, but then again, you work with the data and definitions you have, not with the one you'd wish you had.

Also, your suspicion is quite well-placed, I'd say, but now I'd also add this: since the 'booster injection' roll-out, all the negative vibes that 'the unclean' used to get--are going to the 'fully vaccinanated' (with two injections), as they are pressured to get a third injection now. In addition, all the negative issues about adverse events etc. cannot be placed on 'the unclean' anymore.

Still, many problems, few 'solutions'.

Expand full comment

Btw, did you notice the transition from ‘fully vaccinated’ to ‘up to date’ status? I wrote about it a few days ago.

Expand full comment