Covid in Norway—the State of Play in mid-January, pt. 1

Epidemiological Evidence of Medical Malpractice and Sinking (dropping) VE point squarely to Massive Public Policy Failure

I could, should, and will update you on developments Covidistan, too, but things are heating up in Norway right now. Two weeks after my last longer and analytical piece, here’s what you can find in this mid-January two-part update:

Commentary w/respect to the reports from week, as well as a primer into the current risk assessment on all things Covid by the Institute of Public Health (IPH)

Tomorrow’s post will focus on the current tug-of-war between the government and (vs.) ‘public health authorities’, which is in full swing these days

Without much further ado, here are the highlights from the first two weeks of Covid updates from the IPH.

Media Hype and Booster Shots meet Reality

In my end-of-year piece (linked above), I held that

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.

While I stand by this statement, this was then and now is now. There are now more data available to kind of try to put the below assessment together, which goes a long way to say: we know much more today than we did a month ago, hence, here’s what I think is important.

The share of ‘vaccinated’ vs. ‘unvaccinated’ hospitalisations first changed positions in week 40/41 (early October). By then, the number of hospitalisations of jabbed patients consistently outpaced the number of ‘unvaxxed’ individuals, which served as a kind of ‘break’ on the full-out demonisation of the country’s (few) ‘unclean’ residents.

By week 49 (early December), courtesy of the ‘booster’ uptake, these trend lines had reversed themselves, with the ‘unvaccinated’ overtaking, again, the ‘fully vaccinated’ in terms of hospital admissions. This development, however temporary, unleashed the media hounds and their willing verbal executioners onto the population, with the result being, predictably, extreme gaslighting known from other places.

To their credit, this propaganda wasn’t taken up like elsewhere, and Norwegians continued to express considerable restraint, if not outright objection to these shifts in media coverage. Adding fuel to fire, the Institute of Public Health (IPH) produced a string of seemingly-breathless, if rather poorly-compiled, assessments just before Christmas (see here and here) that advocated for a (partial) lockdown.

The government elected to follow the IPH’s advice, if only to try to avoid the worst possible outcomes ‘predicted’, with a veritable laundry list of caveats, by the IPH’s modellers and repeated ad nauseam, if ever so selectively, by the media.

Also, the one question no-one in either government or the IPH was willing to tackle so far is this: are the boosters actually working?

Sidenote: now, just yesterday Alex Berenson declared ‘boosters are over’ twice, yesterday, and while I wish it was true, I actually watched to pertinent EMA Technical Briefing from 11 Jan. 2022 (couldn’t find a transcript yet), and my spouse became livid over time, esp. the more (crap) Dr. Cavaleri spouted. For the record, I remain quite wary of Berenson’s interpretation, all I heard was ‘vaccines are awesome’, let’s just do it some more. I digress here, and I shall address the EMA briefing in due time, for now, let’s return to Norway, shall we?

Fun with Graphs and Numbers, IPH-Style

The following ‘information’ comes from the IPH’s update for week 52 (27 Dec. 2021-2 Jan. 2022) and week 1 (3-9 Jan. 2022), and the main points are summarised as follows:

First of all, the IPH has shifted the reporting emphasis from ‘all matters Covid’ to ‘Severe Covid-19 Disease Course’. In other words: there is still Covid-19-the-illness, but the IPH highlights ‘only’ its ‘severe course’.

Omicron is now estimated to be the dominant strain in Norway, and the IPH holds that the risk of hospitalisation due to Omicron is currently ‘69% lower than with the Delta variant’.

There were some changes reported in the hospitalisation and death, esp. concerning the elderly, from Covid contexts, but I’m honestly wary to describe them as anything but a temporary phenomenon due to the booster roll-out.

There is one major change in the way the data is present, though, and it concerns the impact of the ‘booster jabs’. For comparisons, do take a brief look at my piece on weeks 50-51 (13-26 Dec. 2021), which highlighted the IPH’s differentiation between referred ‘fully vaccinated’ and ‘unvaccinated’.

Here, the reports for weeks 52 (2021) and 1 (2022) are meaningfully different, for they both provide detailed data on ‘fully jabbed-and-boosted’ individuals, so let’s go and have a look.

• In week 52 (27 Dec. 2021-2 Jan. 2022, p. 12-13), there were 180 new admissions; the vaccination status was known in 168 cases: 90 (54%) were ‘unvaccinated’ vs. 73 (43%) were ‘fully vaccinated’ and/or ‘recently boosted’; of these 73 ‘jabbed’ admissions, 24 were ‘recently boosted’.

• In week 1, (3-9 Jan. 2022, p. 12-13), there were 138 new admissions, of whom 64 (49%) were ‘unvaccinated’, 39 (30%) were ‘fully vaccinated’, and—in a major break from earlier reports—24 (18%) had received a ‘booster’.

While the latter report (p. 12) goes on to emphasise that ‘the share of unvaccinated admissions has exceeded the share of fully vaccinated since week 49 [2021]’, it is quite obvious so see what is happening: the trend lines are in the process of reversing themselves, i.e., very soon, perhaps as early as late January, the combined share of ‘fully vaccinated’ and ‘boosted’ admissions will, again, outpace hospitalisations of ‘unvaccinated’.

This is visualised by figure 7 (in the latter report, p. 14):

Here, take a moment to note the extraordinarily high levels of vaccine uptake among Norwegians (source here, p. 11-12, table 1):

These data suggest the following main issues:

• The gap between admissions of ‘jabbed’ vs. ‘unvaxxed’ patients is rapidly closing (which I ‘predicted’ two weeks ago, but it was very obvious to anyone who read the available data).

• My estimation that the trend lines will cross once again (fig. 7, above) appears to be coming true, too, hence it’s entirely reasonable to expect the ‘boosted’ category to overtake the ‘fully vaccinated’ category before the former will also overtake the ‘unvaccinated’.

• Remember, the trend first reversed itself in October (weeks 41-49), and the ‘unvaccinated’ only overtook their ‘vaccinated’ peers due to the booster shots.

• Also, as we learn in the report on week 1 on Covid-19 associated deaths (p. 21), boosters didn’t change a thing about mortality: 95+ percent of the oldest continue to die irrespective of vaccination.

I shall explore the implications of these developments in part 2.