Covid Update from Norway

Official Numbers from Week 46, version 2 (15-21 Nov. 2021)

There’s so much else to get into these days, and I’ll try to give you an update on the situation in Austria and the incoming government in Germany over the weekend, but this here shall come first.

Yesterday, I provided you with information about the Norwegian Institute of Public Health’s (IPH) weekly update for the period from 15-21 Nov. 2021.

As you may recall, the main feature that looked…well, odd, I guess, was the tacit mentioning of hospitalization numbers. This is what I wrote yesterday:

In week 45, the total of ‘unvaccinated’ hospitalisations since 28 December 2020 (the beginning of the vaccination campaign in Norway) is given as 2,815 vs. 92 ‘partially vaccinated’, and 514 ‘fully vaccinated’.

In week 46, the total of ‘unvaccinated’ hospitalisations since 28 December 2020 (the beginning of the vaccination campaign in Norway) is still recorded as 2,815 vs. 598 ‘fully vaccinated’.

If that was, in fact, true, then there were no new hospitalised ‘unvaccinated’ in Norway in week 46. Thus, I wrote: ‘Only one of these data points can be true.’

I’d like to qualify this statement: it might be that both are, in fact, wrong.

Why would I allege this?

In the first place, there are known inconsistencies in the Norwegian data (see here), and in yesterday’s post I also pointed out that both the written English (and Norwegian) summaries on the IPH’S were giving numbers that did not appear in the detailed weekly reports.

So, guess what happened since I posted yesterday (i.e., less than 24 hours ago, at the time I write this here)?

Behold, the IPH uploaded a new version

There is now an ‘updated’ version available at the Institute of Public Health’s website.

Here are the main take-aways:

‘146 new patients have so far been reported in week 46, after 163 in week 45.

Vaccination status was available for 133 new patients admitted with COVID-19 as the main cause in week 46. Of these, 47 (35%) were unvaccinated and 90 (60%) were fully vaccinated.’

So far, so good, according to the English summary.

Now let’s look at the updated report to figure out what’s changed.

There’s now this wonderful table 1 (p. 5), which I reproduce here in part; do click on the above link to check out the full table (for those who don’t read Norwegian, Google Translate does a fairly o.k. job of rendering Norwegian into something approximating English).

Do note the following points of interest:

• The number of new hospital admissions with Covid-19 as main cause is given as 146.

• Of these, ‘vaccination’ status was available for 133 patients, according to the summary.

• For the category ‘hospitalisation of fully vaccinated 18+ years of age’ (Nye pasienter innlagt blant fullvaksinerte 18 år og eldre, 3rd row), table 1 gives their number as 80.

• For the category ‘hospitalisation of unvaccinated 18+ years of age’ (Nye pasienter innlagt blant uvaksinerte 18 år og eldre, 4th row), table 1 gives their number as 45.

I don’t know how to explain the discrepancies between these data points.

Furthermore, the difference (21 hospitalisations) between the sum of these two numbers (80 + 45 = 125) and the total of new hospitalisations with Covid-19 as main cause (146) is not due hospitalisations of (partially vaccinated?) individuals younger than 18 years of age, as per table 3 of the same report (p. 11):

The first row (look at the third column from the right, which is sub-headed as ‘number’, or antall) shows that there were ‘only’ 9 hospital admissions of individuals who fall in the age bracket 0-17 years of age ‘in the past four weeks’ (siste 4 uker; my emphasis).

One final point about the total number of hospitalisations since the beginning of the Norwegian ‘vaccination’ campaign: in yesterday’s post, I mentioned the cumulative number of hospital admissions of ‘unvaccinated’ patients did not change from week 45 to week 46.

Note, below, in the updated (‘versjon 2’) version of the IPH’s update for week 46 that table 5 (p. 12) has the same total cumulative number of ‘unvaccinated’ hospitalisations as had the report for week 45 and the first version of the report for week 46.

Open Questions

There were 2,815 admissions of ‘unvaccinated’ patients by week 45 of 2021.

There were still 2,815 admissions of ‘unvaccinated’ patients by week 46 of 2021 (version 1).

There were still (!) 2,815 admissions of ‘unvaccinated’ patients by week 46 of 2021 (version 2).

That is despite the front page of the weekly updates claiming (on which see below), in both Norwegian and English:

And here’s the English version:

There were either 47 new ‘unvaccinated’ hospitalisations as per the website or 40 new ‘unvaccinated’ hospital admissions as per the weekly report.

Either way—and, yes, I think this discrepancy is problematic—if that is actually the case, then the cumulative total number of ‘unvaccinated’ patients admitted to a Norwegian hospital since 28 Dec. 2020 (the start of the ‘vaccination’ campaign) should be either 2,862 (i.e., 2,815 + 47) or 2,855 (i.e., 2,815 + 40) patients.

So, to sum up: apparently, someone over at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health ‘found’ some inconsistencies in week 46’s first version, which was deemed significant enough to warrant issuing of a second version less than 24 hours after the original report went online.

Still, time to ponder these four facts:

1. Curiously enough, while there’s now a new table 1 on p. 5 in the updated version.

2. This table 1 doesn’t give the same numbers of hospitalisations than the summary on p. 3 of the same document.

3. Table 1 doesn’t give the same numbers as the Norwegian and English summaries on the IPH’s website.

4. And the data in table 5 on p. 12 is not consistent with either the website summaries (in either language) nor the summary on p. 3.

So, I think the people over at the IPH have replaced one error-riddled file with another one while, at the same time, they managed to actually increase the inconsistencies.

What do you make of this?

P.S.: I downloaded the two reports, if you’d like to get your hands on them (in case the IPH will remove them), email me at diefackel2punkt0@protonmail.com.