all relative to 'the unvaccinated'; meanwhile, in the past 4 weeks, 'all-cause injected' die at 3X the rate of 'the unvaxxed'--with the above risks (even) higher, guess where the death ratio is going…
Something to note, perhaps: Norway, as has Sweden, has school holidays during weeks 7-11. Different regions have holiday one week at the time so as not to overload the ski resorts and roads and such.
So week 7 was the first such week with people mingling at after-ski, living in small lodges, and so on. Meaning that after week 11 a great many families will have mingled and travelled hither and yon across the country - and then going back to school. As I know from personal experience, the week after sportlov (sport holiday) is always a week where you have lots of students and colleagues at home sick, and you can't find temps for money or mercy.
Don't b surprised if we get a Covid-bump between weeks 12-14. If the russian-ukrainian situation has moved on to at least armistice by then, we'll probably get more fear porn in the media as various political besserwissers will want to capitalise on it.
If you recall, Norway's winter tourism in, of all places, Ischgl, Austria (lol, now that I think of it), contributed to about half of all early Norwegian Covid cases in late February and early March 2020. But keep in mind that it's not 'just' Norwegians who flock to the Alps for skiing-and-partying holidays in 'the south'. The only difference as to a slightly later Swedish outbreak was that the upper middle-class segments of esp. Stockholm had their winter holidays 'only' a week later.
Here where I live, next week is this winter break, hence I fully expect more 'cases' or whatever in about two weeks. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the situation is pretty 'bad' already, with my daughter's kindergarten again reducing opening hours on Thursday and Friday due to excessive numbers of staff on sick leave (one my the more beloved teachers has been on sick leave for 4+ weeks now).
Given the above numbers--and more evidence of the potential effects of the mRNA injections in particular piling up: see this new study from Sweden (https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73/htm)--I think most governments will just hope (pretend) that there's nothing to see here, really.
The question is: will this issue come back in about a year when the Government Accountacy Offices will decry the misuse of public funds for buying a lot of these injections that, from now on, fewer and fewer people will take?
In another anecdote, I had a chat with one of our former graduate students who returned to the Low Countries last November: after admitting to having received two injections (doesn't appear to have taken the third), he asked me about more accurate information than that povided by the government and the legacy media. While I'm only too happy to oblige, my colleague was very wary of the booster injection (rightly so), which leads me to conclude, however tentatively, that more and more people are 'waking up'.
Once the Ukraine-Russia story will be old news in a few weeks or months, we may even get some media people actually doing, well, journalism and ask the right questions (if only to deflect the blame for their share of the misery onto the politicians and public health experts).
You may remember (if you were aware of it then) that the swedish daily Dagens Nyheter (Daily News, literally) which is the paper politicians reads to see what's what, led a brief charge against what was then decried as paranoid anti-chinese racist alarmism, in winter 2019/2020. DN's editorial team even went so far as to sponsor and endorse a skiing trip for an unknown number of people. In januari and february of 2020. To the italian alps, where Covid was spreading quite rapidly at the time.
Since the narrative switched quite quickly during february 2020, they have since buried and kept schtumm about this idiocy from "Sweden's foremost newspaper" - the editor of which proudly calls his brand of reporting "agenda journalism".
The MDPI-link throws a 404 at me, unknown why.
Rant:
What I hope is that lower functionaires in the various agencies and offices involved will discreetly make sure to keep standards of hygiene up in kindergartens, hospitals, nursing homes and so on. This has probably done much more to curb rates of spread than any other measure. If we could go back to the proper system of how to keep such places clean, it would be even better:
I worked as a cleaner as a teenager. Full time, incluing off hours. When you worked hospitals back then, you were assigned a sector. Say part of a ward - a corridor, with all adjacent rooms. That was your turf which you kept clean during your shift, meaning it was very clean as you worked it continuously during the day. Around the year 2000 (an by then I hadn't been a teen for a long time - tempus fugit) this was swapped out for an NPM-system. The cleaners got a list of items to work through and a set time to keep for each item on the list, meaning what wasn't on the list wasn't cleaned.
Also, cleaners were no longer hired directly as hospital staff but were brought in as hire-on-demand serfs from the lowest private contractor, invariably meaning that cleaners now are african and mid-east migrants who don't swedish or the basics of hygiene as it pertains to hospitals. Most of them have zero job security, and zero career options and some other factors of that character - meaning they don't really care about anything but marking time and doing as little as they can get away with. Seeing how they are treated I can't fault how they react.
So now our hospitals in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö often have problems relating to poor hygiene. While the staff is told not to use too much thread when stitching up patients. Management by fear, NPM, QALY, and more administrators than doctors and no secretaries for doctors - since secretary is a misogynist and demeaning job - equals perfect storm. We're at the top of cost per capita in the EU for what the system costs, and at the bottom in accessability, doctors/citizen and so on.
It's a right mercy and no mistake Covid wasn't as lethal as measles.
Hi Igor, that was a fast reply--what do you make of the Norwegian risk rates? I think they are 'even' worse than the UKUSA data, but then again, I also think that the Norwegian data--because the Norwegians are a bit more transparent (relatively speaking)--may only provide a floor for these issues elsewhere.
As to the reading Norwegian issue, Google Translate does a fairly ok-ish job of translating the file into something approximating at least understandable English. If you'd give it a try and like to talk, drop me a line at diefackel2punkt0 (AT) protonmail.com.
I do not think that I can google translate PDFs. I think that Norwegians are humans just like Brits so no surprise they have the same issues. I also thought that Norwegians were healthier and less overweight.
I fully understand this, hence you're invited to trust my reading of these issues, then.
As to the overall health status of Norwegians: I tentatively agree, but I think it's also about the social insurance policies (less worries about feeding one's kids, health insurance incl. dental until one's child reaches 18, etc.) that will take a good deal out of anxiety-related factors elsewhere.
Obesity is surely something to consider, but in the absence of detailed data on comorbidities etc., I must pass on this one (but I'd wager a guess: it's less likely to play a role compared to, say, the other Nordics, but it may be a factor that plays a larger role along the lower rungs of the socio-economic distribution, albeit with due consideration of the above reservations).
I don't understand how/why you used absolute numbers when calculating the risks ratios. Vax group and unvaxxed group are very different sizes. Shouldn't rates be used to calculate risk ratios when groups are of unequal size?
I'm using these absolute numbers to calculate the risk ratios for two reasons:
1) the IPH doesn't provide me with risk ratios, hence if I'd calculate the incidences per 100,000 to deterine risk ratios, I'd (unneccessarily) add at least one mathematical layer, which strikes me as odd.
2) the rates I suggest are quite bad, I admit to this, but mainly for reasons you also alkude to: the differences between the two groups are so vast and the absolute numbers comparatively small (esp. for ICU admission and mechanical ventilation) that it would appear to be better, relatively speaking, to compare absolute numbers and forego the desire to extrapolate these to match the incidence per 100,000 madness. Also, I'm very much interested in the risk ratio per injection, not per injectee.
Hmm, that seems odd: there's hardly any 'unvaccinated' people left in Iceland.
Would you mind sharing the link to the data as I'd like to see the 'absolute' numbers?
Iceland's population is so small that these calculated incidence rates are, I'd say, meaningless: Iceland has som 364,000 inhabitants (census, 2020) and, according to OWID, almost 84% of its population has received 'at least one injection'. This means that the ‘unvaccinated' comprise less than 60,000 people all across Iceland. Thus follows that the incidence rate of 94.5/100,000 that you mentioned seems…outlandishly high, if not outright impossible. These rates may only work, if at-all, I suggest, if all of Iceland's injected get boosted, like three weeks ago.
Also, I don't think that Iceland's overall picture differs that much from, say, Norway, but then again, I don't know for sure.
I am pretty certain that the incidence of 94.5 / 100,000 means exactly 24 people (over the 14-day time period), from an unvaccinated adult population of around 25,400. It's all in my substack post you linked to (with data from Feb 15th), including a link to the Iceland statistics page. A csv with incidence rates can be downloaded, everything else I had to infer.
Yep, I've see that post, as well as your more recent one on Germany.
The main issue, also alluded to by Witzbold (see below), I think is that small countries such as Iceland and Norway have better data available (compared to, say, Germany or the US), which begs the question of comparability.
I think it's both tragic and sad, and I would like to point out that, e.g., Igor Chudov is always pointing to the fact that 'they' (the injected) are our family, loved ones, friends, neighbours, and the like. There must be compassion and understanding, if not outright charity (in its traditional Christian sense).
That said, there should--nay: must--be accountability, and given the situation, we may get lucky: politicians relied on (public health) experts who relied on Big Pharma, which is where that particular buck stops. I could even see some politicians pointing fingers at public health experts who will join the former and point at Big Pharma. No worries, some scapegoat will be found and perhaps even tried, but in the end, not much will change.
As to the ADE question: I'm not qualified to answer this one, but it would certainly look like Sars-Cov-2 (in whatever post-Delta variant) appears to select for the injected segments.
Now, I'm not a MD, molecular biologist, or the like, but simply applying logic suggests that evolutionary success of viruses is intimately related to the size of the infect-able target population. Hence, if there's 90+ percent of any given population--such as the Norwegian--that has received these mRNA injections, they are a much more interesting, or promising, 'target' population for Sars-Cov-2 than the few, very dispersed 'unvaccinated' individuals. In other words: it doesn't make 'sense', evolutionarily speaking, for the virus to adapt to the few, if the many (injected) offer many more opportunities to 'succeed', doesn't it? Logic further suggests that the aspect of (potential) sterilising immunity after infection of an 'unvaccinated' also closes the door on transmission after exposure.
Furthermore, keep in mind that injection uptake is much higher among the elderly and most vulnerable, who are also the prime target for the influenza-like illness Covid-19, hence there's another 'forcing' at work that might apply selection pressure (bias) in evolutionary terms.
Something to note, perhaps: Norway, as has Sweden, has school holidays during weeks 7-11. Different regions have holiday one week at the time so as not to overload the ski resorts and roads and such.
So week 7 was the first such week with people mingling at after-ski, living in small lodges, and so on. Meaning that after week 11 a great many families will have mingled and travelled hither and yon across the country - and then going back to school. As I know from personal experience, the week after sportlov (sport holiday) is always a week where you have lots of students and colleagues at home sick, and you can't find temps for money or mercy.
Don't b surprised if we get a Covid-bump between weeks 12-14. If the russian-ukrainian situation has moved on to at least armistice by then, we'll probably get more fear porn in the media as various political besserwissers will want to capitalise on it.
Yep, that's very much true.
If you recall, Norway's winter tourism in, of all places, Ischgl, Austria (lol, now that I think of it), contributed to about half of all early Norwegian Covid cases in late February and early March 2020. But keep in mind that it's not 'just' Norwegians who flock to the Alps for skiing-and-partying holidays in 'the south'. The only difference as to a slightly later Swedish outbreak was that the upper middle-class segments of esp. Stockholm had their winter holidays 'only' a week later.
Here where I live, next week is this winter break, hence I fully expect more 'cases' or whatever in about two weeks. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the situation is pretty 'bad' already, with my daughter's kindergarten again reducing opening hours on Thursday and Friday due to excessive numbers of staff on sick leave (one my the more beloved teachers has been on sick leave for 4+ weeks now).
Given the above numbers--and more evidence of the potential effects of the mRNA injections in particular piling up: see this new study from Sweden (https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73/htm)--I think most governments will just hope (pretend) that there's nothing to see here, really.
The question is: will this issue come back in about a year when the Government Accountacy Offices will decry the misuse of public funds for buying a lot of these injections that, from now on, fewer and fewer people will take?
In another anecdote, I had a chat with one of our former graduate students who returned to the Low Countries last November: after admitting to having received two injections (doesn't appear to have taken the third), he asked me about more accurate information than that povided by the government and the legacy media. While I'm only too happy to oblige, my colleague was very wary of the booster injection (rightly so), which leads me to conclude, however tentatively, that more and more people are 'waking up'.
Once the Ukraine-Russia story will be old news in a few weeks or months, we may even get some media people actually doing, well, journalism and ask the right questions (if only to deflect the blame for their share of the misery onto the politicians and public health experts).
I'll pile on your already good points:
You may remember (if you were aware of it then) that the swedish daily Dagens Nyheter (Daily News, literally) which is the paper politicians reads to see what's what, led a brief charge against what was then decried as paranoid anti-chinese racist alarmism, in winter 2019/2020. DN's editorial team even went so far as to sponsor and endorse a skiing trip for an unknown number of people. In januari and february of 2020. To the italian alps, where Covid was spreading quite rapidly at the time.
Since the narrative switched quite quickly during february 2020, they have since buried and kept schtumm about this idiocy from "Sweden's foremost newspaper" - the editor of which proudly calls his brand of reporting "agenda journalism".
The MDPI-link throws a 404 at me, unknown why.
Rant:
What I hope is that lower functionaires in the various agencies and offices involved will discreetly make sure to keep standards of hygiene up in kindergartens, hospitals, nursing homes and so on. This has probably done much more to curb rates of spread than any other measure. If we could go back to the proper system of how to keep such places clean, it would be even better:
I worked as a cleaner as a teenager. Full time, incluing off hours. When you worked hospitals back then, you were assigned a sector. Say part of a ward - a corridor, with all adjacent rooms. That was your turf which you kept clean during your shift, meaning it was very clean as you worked it continuously during the day. Around the year 2000 (an by then I hadn't been a teen for a long time - tempus fugit) this was swapped out for an NPM-system. The cleaners got a list of items to work through and a set time to keep for each item on the list, meaning what wasn't on the list wasn't cleaned.
Also, cleaners were no longer hired directly as hospital staff but were brought in as hire-on-demand serfs from the lowest private contractor, invariably meaning that cleaners now are african and mid-east migrants who don't swedish or the basics of hygiene as it pertains to hospitals. Most of them have zero job security, and zero career options and some other factors of that character - meaning they don't really care about anything but marking time and doing as little as they can get away with. Seeing how they are treated I can't fault how they react.
So now our hospitals in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö often have problems relating to poor hygiene. While the staff is told not to use too much thread when stitching up patients. Management by fear, NPM, QALY, and more administrators than doctors and no secretaries for doctors - since secretary is a misogynist and demeaning job - equals perfect storm. We're at the top of cost per capita in the EU for what the system costs, and at the bottom in accessability, doctors/citizen and so on.
It's a right mercy and no mistake Covid wasn't as lethal as measles.
I love your article! I wish I could read the underlying PDF file.
Hi Igor, that was a fast reply--what do you make of the Norwegian risk rates? I think they are 'even' worse than the UKUSA data, but then again, I also think that the Norwegian data--because the Norwegians are a bit more transparent (relatively speaking)--may only provide a floor for these issues elsewhere.
As to the reading Norwegian issue, Google Translate does a fairly ok-ish job of translating the file into something approximating at least understandable English. If you'd give it a try and like to talk, drop me a line at diefackel2punkt0 (AT) protonmail.com.
Cheers!
I do not think that I can google translate PDFs. I think that Norwegians are humans just like Brits so no surprise they have the same issues. I also thought that Norwegians were healthier and less overweight.
I fully understand this, hence you're invited to trust my reading of these issues, then.
As to the overall health status of Norwegians: I tentatively agree, but I think it's also about the social insurance policies (less worries about feeding one's kids, health insurance incl. dental until one's child reaches 18, etc.) that will take a good deal out of anxiety-related factors elsewhere.
Obesity is surely something to consider, but in the absence of detailed data on comorbidities etc., I must pass on this one (but I'd wager a guess: it's less likely to play a role compared to, say, the other Nordics, but it may be a factor that plays a larger role along the lower rungs of the socio-economic distribution, albeit with due consideration of the above reservations).
I don't understand how/why you used absolute numbers when calculating the risks ratios. Vax group and unvaxxed group are very different sizes. Shouldn't rates be used to calculate risk ratios when groups are of unequal size?
Apologies for the much-delayed reply.
I'm using these absolute numbers to calculate the risk ratios for two reasons:
1) the IPH doesn't provide me with risk ratios, hence if I'd calculate the incidences per 100,000 to deterine risk ratios, I'd (unneccessarily) add at least one mathematical layer, which strikes me as odd.
2) the rates I suggest are quite bad, I admit to this, but mainly for reasons you also alkude to: the differences between the two groups are so vast and the absolute numbers comparatively small (esp. for ICU admission and mechanical ventilation) that it would appear to be better, relatively speaking, to compare absolute numbers and forego the desire to extrapolate these to match the incidence per 100,000 madness. Also, I'm very much interested in the risk ratio per injection, not per injectee.
Iceland update: now, incidence of hospitalizations is being provided for four more days (until Feb 19):
- unvaccinated: 94.5 / 100,000
- vaccinated, not boosted: 28.1 / 100,000 -> has to be 136.1 / 100,000, if I am correct
- boosted: 78.6 / 100,000
That gives 90.5 / 100,000 for all vaccinated. Next week they might overtake the unvaccinated.
Hmm, that seems odd: there's hardly any 'unvaccinated' people left in Iceland.
Would you mind sharing the link to the data as I'd like to see the 'absolute' numbers?
Iceland's population is so small that these calculated incidence rates are, I'd say, meaningless: Iceland has som 364,000 inhabitants (census, 2020) and, according to OWID, almost 84% of its population has received 'at least one injection'. This means that the ‘unvaccinated' comprise less than 60,000 people all across Iceland. Thus follows that the incidence rate of 94.5/100,000 that you mentioned seems…outlandishly high, if not outright impossible. These rates may only work, if at-all, I suggest, if all of Iceland's injected get boosted, like three weeks ago.
Also, I don't think that Iceland's overall picture differs that much from, say, Norway, but then again, I don't know for sure.
What do you think?
Here's the data (limited number of downloads):
https://www.file2send.eu/de/download/zIJ92U2PYuhnjg4UzPc1hwIDafqk6fRO7RH0CkShX5pQ22vrVoRVX7n1aEmPbURw
Much obliged.
I am pretty certain that the incidence of 94.5 / 100,000 means exactly 24 people (over the 14-day time period), from an unvaccinated adult population of around 25,400. It's all in my substack post you linked to (with data from Feb 15th), including a link to the Iceland statistics page. A csv with incidence rates can be downloaded, everything else I had to infer.
Yep, I've see that post, as well as your more recent one on Germany.
The main issue, also alluded to by Witzbold (see below), I think is that small countries such as Iceland and Norway have better data available (compared to, say, Germany or the US), which begs the question of comparability.
I think it's both tragic and sad, and I would like to point out that, e.g., Igor Chudov is always pointing to the fact that 'they' (the injected) are our family, loved ones, friends, neighbours, and the like. There must be compassion and understanding, if not outright charity (in its traditional Christian sense).
That said, there should--nay: must--be accountability, and given the situation, we may get lucky: politicians relied on (public health) experts who relied on Big Pharma, which is where that particular buck stops. I could even see some politicians pointing fingers at public health experts who will join the former and point at Big Pharma. No worries, some scapegoat will be found and perhaps even tried, but in the end, not much will change.
As to the ADE question: I'm not qualified to answer this one, but it would certainly look like Sars-Cov-2 (in whatever post-Delta variant) appears to select for the injected segments.
Now, I'm not a MD, molecular biologist, or the like, but simply applying logic suggests that evolutionary success of viruses is intimately related to the size of the infect-able target population. Hence, if there's 90+ percent of any given population--such as the Norwegian--that has received these mRNA injections, they are a much more interesting, or promising, 'target' population for Sars-Cov-2 than the few, very dispersed 'unvaccinated' individuals. In other words: it doesn't make 'sense', evolutionarily speaking, for the virus to adapt to the few, if the many (injected) offer many more opportunities to 'succeed', doesn't it? Logic further suggests that the aspect of (potential) sterilising immunity after infection of an 'unvaccinated' also closes the door on transmission after exposure.
Furthermore, keep in mind that injection uptake is much higher among the elderly and most vulnerable, who are also the prime target for the influenza-like illness Covid-19, hence there's another 'forcing' at work that might apply selection pressure (bias) in evolutionary terms.