Covid in Norway: Mortality Declines Rapidly While ERs Continue to be Under Severe Pressure while the IPH Rewrites the History of the 'Pandemic'

ER Doc Calls Sustained High Pressures on Emergency Dept.s 'a New Normal', As Reported by State Broadcaster NRK; meanwhile, Public Health Officialdom Continues its Crusade vs. their Actions

Meanwhile, some (old) ‘news’ on the Covid (domestic) front as state broadcaster NRK came out with a new feature of the situation in Norway’s emergency rooms.

Curiously enough, the accompanying pictures looked familiar enough, and a little bit of digging on my Substack revealed that the below-reproduced piece is actually a ‘sequel’ to a piece I’ve translated and commented on last October, including the very same ER doc. Reference is thus made to this piece:

The below piece appeared on 24 May 2023 on the website of Norwegian state broadcaster NRK (source). Written by the same reporter, one Jan-Erik Wilthil, it may be treated as a follow-up to last October’s piece whose main take-away was this:

Patients aren’t sick with Covid

‘We never have fewer than 100 patients every day. There are adults with all sorts of ailments. We don’t understand why’, says Rasmussen.

He has been in contact with several other emergency departments across the country. All report a mysterious increase in the number of patients. Few of them are sick with Covid.

‘There is not any single one disease that stands out. It is worrying’, says Rasmussen…

Excess Mortality

At the same time, the excess mortality is also increasing. In Norway, excess mortality of more than 10% has been recorded so far this year.

‘This is more than we had expected. The figures are partly inexplicable’, says demographer Anders Sønstebø from Statistics Norway…

‘We are aware that admissions at the hospitals have been persistently high in recent months. We are concerned’, says Deputy Director of the Health Directorate, Espen Rostrup Nakstad…

‘We have had a low mortality rate during the pandemic. Those who have not yet been affected by the pandemic have become older, and they are thus more vulnerable. It can also be reflected in an increased incidence of disease in the population’, says Nakstad.

With the stage thus set, here’s yesterday’s piece, as always, translation and emphases are mine, as are the bottom lines.

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Mortality Rates Plummet in Norway

By Jan-Erik Wilthil, NRK, 24 May 2023

Mortality rates are in free fall in Norway and much of Europe, after several years of significant excess mortality during the pandemic. At the same time, hospitals are experiencing a large influx of patients.

'We are still under a lot of pressure in the ER department’, says Jørn Einar Rasmussen, chair of the Norwegian Association for Emergency and Trauma Medicine.

He is an emergency specialist at Drammen Hospital [Drammen is located some 25km to Oslo’s southwest]. Last year, he raised the alarm when an increasing number of patients had to be treated in the emergency department. At its peak, 100 patients had to be treated daily, and Mr Rasmussen was concerned about capacity.

[You can find my translation of his call to action in the above-linked piece; note that while the number itself is meaningless without context, Drammen has some 100,000 inhabitants and its hospital has a total bed capacity of around 70 patients, i.e., 100 visitors in the ER on a daily basis is a lot of pressure]

The situation has not changed significantly since then.

'It looks like we have now reached a new normal. We are seeing far more patients than we did before the pandemic, but we have become better at handling this now’, says Rasmussen.

He believes that emergency departments in many parts of the country are in the same situation.

Excess Mortality Rates Plummet

However, one important thing has changed since then [October 2022]: far fewer patients are dying.

In recent months, the death rate has fallen dramatically in Norway.

The graph below shows the trend in Norway in 2022 and up to April this year.

Ill: Excess Mortality in Norway, 2022-23, in percent and compared to 2016-19; the blue line (dødsfall = deaths) shows excess mortality.

It clearly shows that something happened after the New Year.

‘Both the Corona wave and the influenza epidemic declined rapidly after the New Year, and total mortality also fell. It is normal for mortality to peak at the turn of the year. This time, the mortality peak was higher and sharper. It increased rapidly and declined rapidly’, says Preben Aavitsland, Director of Infectious Disease Policy at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

When the Covid mandates were revoked in February last year, the virus was in practice given free rein in the population. The result was a significant excess mortality in Norway.

[I call BS on this one, and I kept the receipts to prove it as the Institute of Public Health assessed, back in late Jan. 2022, that

‘the longer we keep up mandates and measures, the longer the epidemic will last. The aim of these mandates and measures is to reduce the severity of the infection peak, but they will do little to reduce the number of infections.’

Full treatment here:

This isn’t the first time the geniuses over at the IPH are seeking to absolve themselves of their responsibility (see, e.g., here or here), full treatment as of March 2023 here; hence we’ll keep an eye out for it.]

‘Almost the entire population was infected by the coronavirus in 2022, mainly in three major waves. This resulted in nearly 3,500 corona deaths, the vast majority among the elderly. In addition, we had a record high peak in severe influenza at Christmas time’, says Aavitsland.

Up to and including week 18 this year, 563 so-called COVID-19-associated deaths have been registered. In the same period last year, this figure was three times as high. [sure, but keep in mind that ‘so-called Covid-19-associated deaths’ conflate dying of Covid and dying with Covid, as I reported back in March; these numbers don’t mean anything other than people, sadly, died]

Less Severe Disease Expected

However, the danger is not over. [fear! FEAR! FEARRRRRRR!]

New virus variants threaten to cause new waves of infection, but Aavitsland does not believe this means new rounds of high death tolls:

Virtually the entire population has now been infected with coronavirus at least once. The vast majority of adults have also been vaccinated two to four times. In other words, the population has broad protection against serious Covid disease.

According to Aavitsland, the coming waves will therefore consist of people who are infected for the second and third time:

We expect them to have less severe disease. Nevertheless, corona will still cause some deaths among the oldest and most frail, as influenza and pneumonia have done for years. We expect overall mortality to normalise in Norway within a couple of years.

Receding Excess Mortality Across Europe

Most other countries in Europe are experiencing a similar trend. Figures from Eurostat, which collects statistics from all EU and EEA countries, show a clear decline in mortality rates.

In March, an excess mortality rate of just 0.3% was recorded. By comparison, excess mortality stood close to 20% as recently as December last year.

In total, 1,735,000 more European lives have been lost than normal during the three pandemic years.

Caption: ‘mortality is now back to normal in many European countries.’

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Bottom Lines

Remember when those who called out the ‘new normal’ were either its protagonists who derided the criticism levelled at them by critics, such as C.J. Hopkins, Catherine Austin Fitts, and many others?

Well, now ‘even’ ER specialists who observe what is happening are using the term, and they are doing so without any apparent sense of irony or introspection.

Next up, excess mortality rates are declining, as far as Eurostat admits. I say ‘as far’, because not too long ago, Norway’s Public Health Warriors™ ceased transmitting mortality figures to Euromomo citing budgetary problems. This occurred, incidentally, in December 2022 when, according to the above piece, ‘excess mortality stood close to 20%’ What a coincidence that the data feeding the (as close to) ‘real-time’ monitoring of mortality stopped then. It’s perhaps better to put the tinfoil hat aside for a moment, right?

More concretely, we may therefore point to the persistently high levels of ER visits across Norway, albeit patients are coming in for a wide variety of reasons, even though these don’t seem to be as life-threatening as before.

One other issue to note is the absurd amount of gaslighting by the Public Health Warriors™ over at the Institute of Public Health (IPH). With media attention-grabbing Preben Aavitsland as always in the forefront once legacy media calls upon him, we also learned something that many people have been saying for a long time: the jabs are so ‘save and effective’ that, as stated on the record by Aavitsland, ‘the coming waves will therefore consist of people who are infected for the second and third time’.

In particular, as far as anecdotal testimony from within my circles in Norway shows, virtually all my acquaintances are double or triple jabbed, and when they do come down with Covid, they all say it was hard or very hard.

We’ll find out what happens next before too long.

Finally, it’s necessary to call out, in the most shameful way possible, the repeated attempts by Norway’s Public Health Warriors™ to rewrite the history of the past three years. Dear people over at the IPH, politicians, and journos in legacy media, this won’t do. You people have been gaslighting the people for too long, and now you’re gaslighting them in the most transparent and shameful ways. This is as good a point in time to repost this:

Shame on you. I can’t eat as much as I’d like to puke.