One of the most startling facts of the pandemic is that, between January of 2020 and June of 2021, Sweden had negative excess mortality – the country’s age-standardised mortality rate was below the five-year average.
Despite all the warnings about “disaster” and “folly”, Sweden actually saw fewer deaths than usual over this eighteen month period. (The ONS data on which this conclusion is based only go up to June of 2021. But it’s a good bet the picture hasn’t changed much since then.)
Even lockdown sceptics might find this difficult to believe. Sure, Sweden didn’t turn out to be the disaster that lockdown proponents claimed it would be. But can it really be true that there were fewer deaths than usual? What about those reports of Swedish hospitals “filling up with patients” in the winter of 2020?
It can really be true. And those reports are easy to reconcile with the mortality data. You just have to remember two phenomena: the ‘dry tinder’ effect, and mortality displacement.
For those who’ve forgotten, here’s a brief reminder. The ‘dry tinder’ effect refers to the tendency for mortality to increase following a period of unusually low mortality, due to the presence of large numbers of very frail elderly people, who ended up living longer than expected.
Mortality displacement is just the opposite. It refers to the tendency for mortality to decrease following a period of unusually high mortality – for deaths to be ‘brought forward’ by some deadly event, such as a pandemic, heat wave or unusually cold winter.
Once you’re familiar with these two phenomena, you realise it’s perfectly possible for hospitals to fill up temporarily without the mortality rate going up at all in the medium term (over a period of several months or a year, say.)
The chart below shows the weekly age-standardised mortality rate in Sweden as a percentage of the five-year average, from January of 2020 to June of 2021. (I made the chart using data published by the ONS.)
In the winter of 2020, mortality was below average, leading to the build up of ‘dry tinder’. When the pandemic hit in March, mortality increased substantially. It then fell back below average during the summer of 2020, giving rise to mortality displacement. This pattern then repeated itself over the subsequent 12 months.
Aside from the obvious fact that Sweden’s approach didn’t lead to disaster (far from it), what’s the major lesson here? It’s that you won’t get a reliable picture of the pandemic if you only follow the news. After all, ‘Hospitals Fill Up With Patients’ grabs your attention, whereas ‘Another Week of Below-Average Admissions’ doesn’t pack the same punch.
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Yeah, it’s a nice, logical story and conclusion, but there are so many external factors and unkowns that make such an effort and study pretty useless.
Even without economists dismal track record at forecasting anything correctly for much shorter time periods.
And then, we have the robots replacing most of them anyway, and possibly much fewer of them still around anyway, thanks to the Covid NPIs and PIs and those in response to the many upcoming plandemics and climate change ones.
More ridiculous modelling.
My father left school at 14 to start an apprenticeship. At 21 he started two years National Service. In his forties he obtained a post graduate qualification in Management. There were many of his generation who did similar.
He is less formally educated than me but undoubtedly brighter. His handwriting is beautiful. His mechanical skills were exceptional but now unavailable through loss of sight.
I suggest that the disruption to education would be remedied by concentrating on the three R’s, a proper five day week and stripping out ALL the woke BS. Oh and a strong emphasis on teaching Imperial British history and politics.
A problem created via a model is not a problem as we on here know only too well.
A proper emphasis on crafts and arts (not the modern vacuous kind) would also go a long way. Kids aren’t given enough imaginative play and without that they don’t develop an imagination. Too little is invested in allowing genuine culture. But then I guess culture is “racist” by definition.
But think of all that woke history they won’t be learning. How will they manage? An extra month of dead white male bashing is the least we can do. Haven’t the children suffered enough already?
Au contraire
After the black death the wages of artisans rocketed
When the jab bodies pile up this winter I’ll be charging a £1,000 an hour to put your bin bags out
If you book and pay me now it could be a good hedge against inflation
My prices are not likely to stay that low for long
This is meaningless. Necessity is the mother of invention, not curriculum.
We should be under no illusions
The Pig Dictator is just as dangerous as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and all the other tyrants that have left their imprint on humanity
Good interview with Reiner Fuellmich by James Delingpole:
https://rumble.com/vhg4jb-dr-reiner-fuellmich-in-da-house.html
Apparently there’s going to be significant legal progress “in the next 2 or 3 weeks”. Also good on governmental liability (from about 46 minutes).
I am somewhat confused by the surprise being exhibited by many on this speculation concerning the release of the virus from a China laboratory. This has been postulated since the beginning of this nightmare.
It seems to me that there are 3 and only 3 possible scenarios that explain the mass coordinated hysteria by Western Governments.
The first is a vast global conspiracy orchestrated by the WEF and UN to enslave mankind with all the ‘minor’ players like MPs, SAGE members, lab technicians etc. in each country being convinced that they will be on the gravy train when all is done. Such a conspiracy is so unlikely as to be absurd. Conspiracies of 6 or more rarely succeed, let alone one that would require 10s of thousands to participate.
The second is that Western Governments were informed by their ‘security’ services that this ‘novel’ virus was the result of ‘gain of function’ research in China to create a weaponised cold virus. (The source was probably as reliable as the Iraqi taxi driver who convinced the West of Saddam’s WMDs but such dubious provenance would not have hindered their flight to the basement.)
Governments panicked, assuming that this new virus would be easily transmitted like a cold but as deadly as Ebola. Had that been the case they might have been justified in their fear, however, it was obvious within days that they were not, but being the venal, self-serving pond-life that they are they were not prepared to apologise with a public “mea culpa”, instead they continued to destroy jobs, businesses, economies, futures and lives in an attempt to avoid blame for being gutless and inept. After all, their panic clearly undermined the ego and self image of fat, selfish, narcissists like Johnson and the power narcotic of ‘small-man-syndrome’ suffers like Wancock seeking revenge for having his head shoved down the toilet during every PE lesson.
The self serving, mass advertising campaign (>£350 million in the UK) designed to convince the sheeple that this is not a flu-like illness with a similar fatality rate but that it is as deadly as the weaponised virus of their early nightmares, has persisted for more than a year, directly causing more collateral deaths than the virus itself.
This second scenario is almost as absurd as the first. It would require such heartless, selfish, criminal disregard by politicians for the welfare of their populations that it beggars belief. Surely no one would deliberately destroy millions of lives merely to avoid opprobrium of inept decision making? Other than of course; Blair, Brown & Campbell, who happily killed hundreds of thousands pursuing an illegal war justified by deliberate lies told the Parliament and the people of the UK. But now, surely no one would be so evil?
Then there is the third and last possible scenario that is by far the most reasonable, sensible and probable. It fits all the facts and is now being endorsed by the US Government with their lates pronouncements on the subject.
Aliens have arrived and have sprayed the atmosphere with delirium gas causing global, irrational psychosis …