Covid in Norway: An End-of-2021 Round-Up, one Observation, and a Prognosis for early 2022

Un/vaxxed admissions are apparently reversing themselves again: expect more 'jabbed' hospitalisations in the weeks to come, which will become a veritable political albatros

It’s been a week since my last merry-go-around the Covid situation in Norway, and this post is meant to fill you in, dear readers, with the most significant things that caught my eye. Specifically, we’re talking about

Fun with Numbers in Weeks 50 and 51

The two last weekly updates were quite…unique, and they were so for two reasons: on the one hand, in mid-November the testing ‘strategy’ changed significantly, which resulted in a drastic increase in the use of so-called rapid antigen tests. On the other hand, the country-wide roll-out of the ‘booster’ jabs in mid-August has certainly skewed, if not made outright impossible, any clear-eyed assessment of vaccine efficacy and effectiveness.

The below write-up is a (selective) summary from weeks 50 (13-19 Dec.) and 51 (20-26 Dec.) of this year and it marks the final ‘update from Norway’ on this issue for 2021 (don’t worry about the wrong file names, these are two different PDFs but apparently the IPH’s staff is out to lunch on this one, too). Here are the main points:

• ‘Cases’ declined over the past two weeks, but it’s unclear whether or not this is due to the government’s mandates (which I doubt) or to an admixture of less testing, the Christmas holidays, and the ‘booster’ update

• Hospitalisations are similarly down a bit, with some movement esp. among the younger age brackets, but the numbers are so small that it’s doubtful whether their reproduction here adds anything of value to this piece

• Norway’s jabbing campaign, on the other hand, is still up-and-running at full speed, and by now, according to the most recent weekly update (20-26 Dec., p. 3), a full 88% of all senior residents (65+ yo) have gotten a third jab

• Omicron is now estimated to constitute at least 50% of all ‘cases’ in the Oslo metro area, with further growth expected in the coming 2-3 weeks, which leads the Institute of Public Health (IPH) to call for ‘rapid deployment of vaccines’ and ‘preparation for the coming Omicron wave’ (p. 4)

I think that at this point, we should talk about vaccination coverage and hospitalisation with Covid-19 as main cause for admission.

In week 50 (13-19 Dec., p. 11), there were 221 new admissions, of whom 133 (60%) were ‘unvaccinated’ vs. 80 (38%) were ‘fully vaccinated’ and/or ‘recently boosted’; of these 80 ‘jabbed’, 38 (i.e., almost half) were ‘recently boosted’.

In week 51, (20-26 Dec., p. 11), there were 154 new admissions, of whom 104 (58%) were ‘unvaccinated’ vs. 67 (38%) were ‘fully vaccinated’ and/or ‘recently boosted’; of these 67 ‘jabbed’, 22 (i.e., a third) were ‘recently boosted’.

Both reports (p. 12, respectively), provide table 5, which informs about median age etc. Here are the data for week 50:

Here are the data for week 51:

Notice something ‘funny’? The median ages for both jabbed and non-jabbed are inching towards each other: the first time these data were made available was in week 46 (see here and here), and back in mid-November, the median age for ‘unvaccinated’ patients stood at 49 vs. 74 for the ‘vaxxed’. By now, it’s 54-57 (unvaxxed) vs. 66-68 (2-3 jabbed).

What else is there to say? I’ll have more on a host of issues—ranging from Covid jabs and pregnancy, a recent study on hospitalisation time and vaccination, and the Covid-associated death rate—in early January.

On the Vaccination Campaign

The majority of admissions since summer is in the 45+ brackets, i.e., in those age groups that were offered the jabs first. We know about waning protection (whatever that may be worth) over time, and what we can observe now is that for the past months the middle-aged and senior cohorts are filling the hospitals.

‘Booster’ jabs are skewing that picture to a degree that it’s hard to make any reasonable observations, let alone ‘prognosis’, but given that the ‘trend’ of un/vaxxed admission appears to be reversing itself yet again (from week 41 through week 49, the ‘vaccinated’ admissions exceeded those of ‘unvaccinated), it’ll offer one observation and one prognosis.

Here’s the observation, from the report on week 51 (fig. 7, p. 12):

Now, remember that the inversion of un/vaxxed admissions was greeted in Norway with a perverse kind of delight among legacy media, whose protagonists were calling out the ‘unjabbed’ who were ‘getting what they deserve’ (see here).

Do remember also, as per my earlier work on weekly updates, that the share of un/vaxxed admissions never really moved below a 30s : 60s distribution, i.e., at no time did the share of unvaccinated admissions (both hospitalisation and ICU) drop below the mid-30s.

Now, with the ‘booster’ campaign running at full speed, it would appear that this 30s : 60s distribution is about the maximum that the current crop of (problematic) jabs can achieve. My expectation is that the trend lines will cross once again in or around mid-January once the recently-boosted move past the 90-120 day expiration date of whatever protection is afforded by a third jab of a vaccine that was showing considerable signs of weakened efficacy against Delta ‘already’.

Hence, my (conservative) estimation is that the ‘fully jabbed-and-boosted’, who are found among 88% of the elderly, will soon return to their pre-eminent position among Covid-related hospitalisations and ICU admission. At that point, the IPH will probably stop mentioning anything about these data because they are simply too embarrassing to debate.

And this brings me to my—obvious—concluding thought for 2021:

Covid is a Political Problem (it always was)

Of course, Sars-Cov-2 and Covid-19 were always political problems. Yes, they also were health-related issues in the beginning, but at this point in time they are rapidly becoming an entirely, if not outright exclusive, political hot potatoe.

This is due to the incensed sentiments (‘vaxxed’ vs. ‘unvaxxed’) and rising levels of legacy media gaslighting, which is extremely unhelpful, to say the least. Very soon, a day of reckoning will come when government and public health (sic[k]) officials will be faced with the dire consequences of their actions:

• Politicians have put all their eggs in the public health emergency basket, which turned out to be a bottomless pit.

• Meanwhile, public health officials have become intoxicated by their arbitrary powers, which fuels the decay of the medical establishment in general and the entire pandemic wrecking crew in particular

• People like you and me will soon be faced with a veritable Hobson’s choice: continue with the current crop of political and public health leaders or lose everything, despite the former being almost completely discredited by their own actions

At this point, there are no ‘good’ options left: for weeks now, public health officials have been ringing the alarm bells over the budding influenza pandemic-in-the-making—in Norway, Influenza has been afforded the same status as Covid with its own weekly status updates a few weeks ago—which is a testament to the utter derangement so widespread in political and public health circles:

What is to be gained if there will actually be a gigantic Influenza problem in January and February?

• The entire Covid-19 narrative (whatever version thereof) will crumble instantaneously

• It might be a short-term ‘offramp’ to transition the entire Covid-19 response to a more influenza-like approach (i.e., Covid wards like influenza wards, perhaps Covid-and-Infuenza wards)

• Credibility of politicians and public health officials, as well as the legacy media, will be in tatters, but since they are all mainly talking to each other via Twitter and the like, they won’t probably notice before too long

• Cynicism and anti-government sentiment will continue to rise, i.e., return to pre-Covid sentiments, i.e., another ‘year of protest’ is in the making

Finally, if even the more lenient outcomes of the unprecedented ‘gene therapy masquerading as Covid-19 vaccination’ materialise, a lot of people will become very angry, which will be the one and only chance for the political caste everywhere to hold a few token show-trials to try to placate the angry population.

As a society, we will, of course, forget everything and learn nothing.