Covidistan vs Scandinavia: fun with gfx and numbers reveals significant differences w/respect to vaxx uptake, testing, 'cases', hospitalisations, and death

Who would've thought that the more you test, the worse the outcome in terms of Covid responses would be? Covidistan falls very short on all these indicators, which proves massive policy failures

With the dust storm gathering force over in Covidistan, let’s take a break and take another look at Norway, a country whose performance in all maters Covid-19 has been strangely under-reported. What did the Norwegians do? Well, they basically followed their Scandinavian peers, but they never really bragged about it (compared to Sweden) and they are comparatively few steps behind (Denmark).

If anything, the Norwegian authorities—gov’t, Institute of Public Health (IPH), and the Health Directorate—never dared (wanted) to play such a prominent role as, say, neighbouring Sweden. Also, while we’re at this, let’s quickly dismiss any notions of Sweden’s special path here by now: yes, Sweden never locked down and, if Joel Smalley’s recent takes—here on Sweden, and see also here on Austria for comparison—are any guide, excess mortality figures proved the former correct.

With the slight exceptions of Denmark and Iceland—both of which have admitted vaxx defeat, however implicitly—vaccination rates in Austria and its three Nordic peers are virtually identical.

Yet, there were no school closures after spring 2020 in the North; there was also virtually no mass testing of students, which has contributed massively to driving the incidence of testing to insane levels, as shown in the below graphs, first one by Der Standard (as per its recent piece questioning the high levels of testing, and then a comparison with the same countries as above):

For comparisons, here’s the Covidistan vs. Nordics data from OWID; let’s see IF there’s a noticable difference between them:

Keep in mind that these graphs are quite instructive, but since I’m more inclined to look at numbers—they are much better-suited to tell, as opposed to showing graphs, about the insanity this particular issue entails, here goes (courtesy of OWID):

If you scroll down in that ‘table’, you can find the other daily testing rates per 1,000 inhabitants (7-day smoothed) for the other Nordics I mentioned above. For the sake of completeness, their rates are:

• Denmark (just below Greece): 25.08, as of 6 Feb. 2022

• Sweden (way further below): 7.66, as of 30 Jan. 2022, presumably lower now

• Norway (just below Kosovo): 5.25, as of 5 Feb. 2000

• Finland (even further below): 2.28, as of 5 Feb. 2022

In other words: Covidistan is testing its inmates more than three times compared to Denmark, 10X compared to Sweden, 15.5X compared to Norway, and a whopping 35.5X compared to Finland.

Apart from the absence of any reasonable explanation, there are two questions that come to my mind:

1. Did anyone in Covidistan’s Finance Ministry ever make even a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the cost vs. benefits? I mean—here’s an overview of costs per test across many US-based providers, and if you’d take, say, a PCR test without health insurance or the like, it’s somewhere around 200-250 US$ (personal experiences incl. prices varying from 25 € in Covidistan, 75 € at a test site in Prague, Czechia, and I know that private testing in Norway clocks in at some 250 €; further comparisons across the EU are here, and look here for airports around the world)—but that’s not the true cost to taxpayers, isn’t it?

2. Does this testing mania actually do, you know, anything about cases, hospitalisations, and deaths?

For answers to these quite reasonable questions with respect to both public policies and fiscal rectitude, we turn, again, to OWID to determine the major differences between Covidistan (Austria) and the Nordics:

Note that with respect to hospitalisations, no Austrian data was available at OWID; I’ve inserted Czech and German data to ‘stand-in’ for Covidistan, which should be ok-ish as an approximation, however crude.

Note that with respect to ICU admission, no data from Norway was available at OWID.

So, I think the one thing we can conclude from this is: why, again, are we testing that many people if the rate of testing is quite obviously out-of-sync with the other indicators we’ve looked at?

For putative answers, we turn, yet again, to that above-mentioned Der Standard piece by Lisa Nimmervoll, which has a number of hilarities I’d like to share with you (all translations and emphases mine).

Clueless Testing, Back and Forth

Enquiries with epidemiologist Gerald Gartlehner (Danube University Krems) as well as with complexity researcher Peter Klimek and virologist Andreas Bergthaler (both Med-Uni Vienna). The tenor of the experts across these three scientific disciplines: Austria needs a well thought-out, clearly structured testing strategy. Who do we want to test, especially when the next wave rolls in, and why?

Good points, Ms. Nimmervoll, without a doubt poignant questions. I’d have a follow-up, if I may: why did it take the scientists, you, and your ilk about two years to figure out these questions?

But wait, there’s more, this time from Dr. Gartlehner:

Epidemiologically, the plan-less mass-testing of the entire population has very little influence on the overall outcome. Contact-tracing has basically collapsed, which means that there is actually no official consequence for people who test positive and have been in contact with others.

Makes one wonder, though, about what would have happened, say, two years ago IF Sars-Cov-2 would have been the ‘killer virus’ that was advertised by politicians and legacy media (and that’s quite a big if, I’d say, for if that would have been the case, I think it’s very fair to assume our societies would have been reduced to a kind of I Am Legend or Mad Max garden variety by, well, April 2020).

Here’s a sampling of the answers:

What way out does Gartlehner suggest? ‘There needs to be a strategy on who we want to focus on with the tests. Diagnostic testing of people with symptoms should be free of charge, as well as elsewhere where there are high-risk groups, such as in retirement and nursing homes, hospitals, and perhaps for the community with disabilities. Schools are of course multipliers, and they are the only indicator that provides us with a halfway-decent impression of what is going on epidemiologically. Everything else is nothing but a friendly citizen service, but not much more. You can perhaps argue that testing for the public at-large without charge is also important to reduce people’s uncertainty and fears, but epidemiologically this no longer has any effect.’

Again, why do we test point- and aimlessly? Why do we note, in the above quote, that there’s no idea or direction behind the mass-testing frenzy while Ms. Nimmervoll let’s Dr. Gartlehner get away with the gross BS (no offence to cattle) about mass-testing in schools? Again, kids are not at risk from Covid-19, and forcing these pseudo-medical interventions on them so that they may attend an ice-cream parlour or meet their classmates is sheer and utter madness.

Note also that Dr. Gartlehner mentions the effect of the ceaseless fear porn agit-prop that’s been all over the place, and then take a moment to consider the fact that Ms. Nimmervoll (or anyone else over at Der Standard) wouldn’t feel the decency to kinda, you know, talk about their—and the legacy media’s—share of the blame in this particular affair.

Next quote from the piece:

Complexity researcher Klimek also points out, when asked the question of how many tests we ‘need’, that testing should be seen as a kind of magnifying glass. Yet, the effectiveness of this measure ‘also depends on the phase of the pandemic’. In plain language [lol, sorry, couldn’t resist], this means that Omicron has changed the state-of-play enormously because the temporal opportunity for interventions has become much smaller due to a positive result [I doubt that: Omicron is more transmissive and has a shorter incubation period, hence it’s not the test-positivity that matters, but the analytical and communicative capabilities, which are, well, not up to this]. ‘To be able to “test away” a wave, you would have to PCR test the entire population three to four times a week. That is illusory’, says Klimek. But one could do mass-testing in certain settings, e.g., by testing the majority of people in retirement and nursing homes, in critical infrastructure, and in schools, followed perhaps by area-wide testing as a sensible preventive measure.

I’m done with these ‘experts’, for people such as Klimek are as much a large part of the problem with Covid-19-the-social-construct as the inanities spread by legacy media.

I mean: how and what does one answer to a ‘complexity scientist’—who is an associate professor at the Medical University of Vienna, by the way (see here)—who spouts such utter nonsense  like the possibilities of ‘testing away an infectious disease outbreak’, to say nothing about the capabilities of mass-testing with inappropriate means (rt-PCR tests).

Since Covid-19 is potentially very lethal among the elderly—seniors (70+) are up to almost 1000X at risk of dying of Covid compared to kids and teens, according to data from Norway—I could see the merits of protecting retirement and nursing communities by, say, introducing Covid protocols into pre-existing protocols.

But schools? I mean: our kids are the future, and we’ve been doing so much, if not incalculable, harm to them over these past two years. Why double down on that?

To be fair to Klimek, he at least mentions the terms cost/benefit analysis, but he also does it in terms of ‘we’re doing too much in the wrong place’ (and that’s clearly unhelpful).

So, what would the third person have to say about this? For further insights we turn to virologist Bergthaler, who maintains that

[Austria] is carrying out an internationally exception strategy [sic], which constitutes almost an anomaly. We’re testing twice as much as Israel, 8X as much as Switzerland, and almost 20X as much as Germany, and much of it is PCR testing.

In closing, Bergthaler, whose team sequenced quite many of these tests, reminded everyone that ‘testing also has an economic dimension’. Do tell, as a ‘regular’ taxpayer, I’m, you know, kinda aware of this, but I’m glad these brainiacs have learned something in those past two years, too.

So, in closing, a few major issues that we discussed today

Asking (the right) questions about testing—as done by the Constitutional Court two weeks ago (see here, no. 8)—is essential, perhaps even quint-essential, for irrespective of how suitable these Covid tests are (they’re not, by the way), they first created and later maintained the pseudo-empirical basis for the declared ‘public health emergency’.

• The number of ‘Covid Cases’ greatly influences the fear porn agit-prop used by (esp. western) governments to declare and maintain the state of exception, thus enabling a joint venture of government authorities—mainly in the executive branch—and their enablers in ‘advisory bodies’ to arrogate immense power over public policy, discourse, and everyone’s lives.

• As the selective comparison of the Nordic countries with the Covidistan situation show, though, no matter how much you test, it doesn’t appear to affect the incidence rates across ‘cases’, hospitalisations, and death, which in turn should lead to very hard questions about the utility of actually performing these mass tests, in particular in schools.

• The same, by the way, applies to the once-thorny issue of ‘vaccine efficacy’: for Covidistan is actually quite comparable to the Nordics in terms of vaccination rate, but in all the above-related contexts, outperforms (i.e., is worse off than) its Scandinavian peers. If anything, this should provide for ample, if rather easily digestible food for thought among the Covidistan putschists. (As an aside, this is hilariously idiotic for the simple reason that due to small size and neutrality after 1945/55, Austrians have frequently pointed to the ‘like-mindedness’ between themselves and esp. Sweden and Finland, something I’m not going to comment on now.)

Bottom line: the less heavy-handed a country’s measures, the better off these societies, economies, and politics. Basically, the Nordics are quite ok-ish in terms of social cohesion, trust in government authorities, and even-handedness of public policy. And if anyone from Covidistan wishes to dispute this, I’d say: bring it on.