How much can Denmark teach us today about the natural course of the pandemic and the effects of human interventions?
A lot. But let’s start at the beginning.
Long ago, when the world was convinced that stubborn, unlocked-down Sweden was performing a deadly Covid experiment, I explored mortality statistics in the Nordic countries. My first analysis (June 2020, published in Hebrew) was titled ‘Lockdown and Covid mortality: refutations from Sweden’. At that time Covid mortality in Sweden was about five times higher than in Denmark.
In my second analysis of the topic (January 2021, on Twitter), I compared flu, Covid and all-cause mortality in Denmark and Sweden. Over three consecutive ‘flu years’ (October through September), Sweden fared better than Denmark on flu mortality (pre-pandemic), worse on Covid mortality (when flu was absent), and better or similar to Denmark on overall mortality. My analysis was based on data through September 2020.
We now have a much wider perspective on Sweden (elsewhere and below) and Denmark (below).
For reasons that remain unknown, the first major wave of the pandemic was not synchronised worldwide. Denmark, like many other countries, experienced only a minor wave in the Spring of 2020, which was naïvely attributed to lockdown measures. Time proved that it was no more than a nature-dictated delay — until the winter of 2020-2021.
What was the excess mortality in Denmark during the pandemic?
To answer the question we first need to choose carefully a baseline mortality rate — the expected rate if there were no pandemic. That’s the key number.
As shown in the bar graph below, all-cause mortality in Denmark generally declined between 2007 and 2014. In the following five years, up to the pre-pandemic flu year (2018-19), the rate was stable except for 2017-18, a notable exception due to a severe flu season. I used the average mortality rate in those four, fairly stable years as a baseline rate (horizonal line) for excess mortality (%).
Experiencing only a minor Covid wave in the Spring of 2020, Denmark escaped excess mortality in the first pandemic flu-year: October 2019-September 2020.
Sweden, by contrast, was hit early on, ending the first pandemic flu-year with excess mortality of 4%, part of which has ‘balanced’ a mortality deficit of 3.5% in the pre-pandemic flu-year. The true Covid toll in Sweden in the first pandemic year was probably 1-2% excess mortality — not 100%, predicted by reckless models that shut down much of the world.
In the winter of 2020-2021, several months after the pseudo-success of mitigation, Denmark succumbed to its first major Covid wave. The death toll of Covid in Denmark in the second pandemic year (October 2020-September 2021) was 3.7% excess mortality, similar to Sweden a year earlier (4%).
What happened next in Denmark is nothing short of shocking. At a time that was considered post-pandemic in many countries, excess mortality in Denmark markedly increased. Not so in Sweden.
The table shows a year-by-year comparison (October through September) of excess mortality in the two countries.
First, we have no evidence that the so-called mitigation efforts had any merit in Denmark. Considering Sweden’s pre-pandemic ‘mortality deficit’, Denmark did not fare meaningfully better — if at all — over two years of the pandemic.
Second, matters got worse in Denmark in the past flu-year. Excess mortality unexpectedly rose to 9.7%, whereas it (modestly) declined in Sweden. In a country with over 50,000 deaths each year, 10% excess mortality corresponds to about 5,000 deaths above ‘normal’.
Which factors in Denmark, between October 2021 and September 2022, could have played a role?
There were at least three: Covid, flu and vaccines, primarily Covid vaccines, which were ‘highly effective‘, or not. We will return to the last topic shortly.
The two graphs below are limited to the past flu year. Regardless of misattribution of deaths to Covid, we observe a prolonged Covid mortality wave spanning six to seven months, and another small and short wave.
Synchronised below, we see a wave of seasonal flu, about two months long, partly overlapping the major Covid mortality wave. That was the first significant re-appearance of the flu in Denmark since the beginning of the pandemic.
Monthly data on all-cause mortality are well matched with these graphs (red rectangles below). For each month, I indicated the corresponding wave, if present.
A month-over-month comparison of the past flu-year with every year between 2014 and 2019 revealed at least 200 excess deaths each month (and often many more) in over 90% of the comparisons.
I previously argued that computation of Covid excess mortality should be terminated upon the return of the flu because we cannot quantify the share of the latter. I will make a semi-quantitative exception here and try to justify it.
The flu wave in Denmark was short and can account for deaths only in two to three months. It cannot account for much of the 10% excess mortality in the past flu-year. Some excess deaths might have been due to Covid vaccines and other causes such as late effects of disrupted life. Nonetheless, most of the excess mortality in Denmark must have been Covid deaths, aligned with a major, prolonged Covid wave (six to seven months) and another minor wave (two months).
Which brings us to the key point: vaccination.
By the beginning of the past flu-year, over 70% of the population of Denmark was fully vaccinated against Covid, and by mid-February 2022, 60% of the population received a booster dose. The percentages should be higher in older, vulnerable age groups.
If the vaccines were highly effective against death, why was excess mortality in Denmark so much higher than in the previous flu-year? Why was it so much higher than excess mortality in Sweden in the first pandemic year — without vaccines — when the virus was much more virulent than Omicron? Unlike Sweden, there was no ‘mortality deficit’ to account for.
Whatever the exact share of Covid deaths was, it is impossible to reconcile a highly effective vaccine with the excess mortality in Denmark in the past flu-year. Is there any epidemiologist on the planet who would claim that, without vaccination, excess mortality in Denmark would have been much higher than 10%? Five times as high, if the vaccines really were highly effective? Or even just twice as high?
It seems that countries should undergo at least two major mortality waves before reaching the endemic stage — regardless of the prevailing strain. Those that started late, like Denmark, Finland and Norway, will end late. Denmark teaches us that mediocre vaccines cannot change the natural course of a pandemic.
Dr. Eyal Shahar is Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the University of Arizona. This article first appeared on Medium.
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I’ve put a large cardboard box out two weeks running, which they’ve refused to take; presumably because there’s a couple of tiny polystyrene balls at the bottom. I’ve now burnt box at back of garden and will no longer play their silly game of separating the trash. I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to stop playing.
Time to haul out another idiot politician to pay for the sins of our tyrannical bureaucrats.
It’s getting a very long list of them isn’t it?
I once put some rubbish in a rubbish bin, too.
I know, it’s a good job Marcus Aurelius knew isn’t my real name!
Good Lord!
Oh, not that either?
You’re a monster.
Now you tell us, Marcus!
As the saying goes “no good deed goes unpunished”. I would always recommend not binning anything with your intact name or address on it in case the garbage stasi want to trace it back to you. An indelible marker pen or shredding should do the trick.
At least, through incidents like these, people are starting to see how unhinged the environment movement has become.
Been doing that for years. Didn’t think I’d be worrying about the bin police though.
That said, this news should also be used to emphasise the risk of ID theft. Not only could someone go through the bins to identify you – this shows that someone actually did.
I went round, under the cover of darkness, covertly dumping bin bags full of stripped wallpaper in the neighbours’ bins in the street, the night before bin collection.
It’s when we first moved in and the previous owners were obviously fans of the ‘multi-layer’ approach to wallpapering over the decades. We ended up with our garden shed crammed full of these bags.
You’re meant to take it to the tip but we didn’t own a car then and we’d have had to pay through the nose for the council to take it away. It took several weeks but I got shot of it all. ‘Off-territory’ dumping for the win! Fortunately my neighbours are all very chill and helpful, one even suggested I do that, but god knows how much I’d have been fined in Brighton.
I am a master. I’ve got rid of TONS of waste like this. The council employee at the tip told me to do it when I looked aghast at the prospect of having to pay AGAIN for the council to take a few old bricks. Thing is, my neighbours don’t know about this… arrangement… so like you say, darkness and stealth are key
We put an old car engine in a wheelie bin once, back in the 1990s the bins were much bigger. Council truck groaned a bit when it compacted it but there it was, gone..
When wheelie bins were first introduced, as long as it fitted in the bin, you could put it in. True, dat. That was the whole point of them. The only time one wasn’t emptied was when I filled it with garden rubble…it was so heavy it was almost impossible to wheel the bin, so had to take some out and spread it out over a few weeks!
Well I just call it using your initiative. I feel like as the years go by there seems to be more and more rules for us to abide by. The vast majority being totally pointless.
We’ve got some used beer bottles that aren’t made of glass so can’t be recycled. They’re mega heavy and appear to be made from stone or granite. They’ll be getting off-loaded 2 or 3 at a time down at the bins in the car park at the top of the street.
I figure that as long as I don’t do a secretive dump in the dog poo bin I’m not actually doing anything wrong..
There is actually a bin for dog poo———–It’s called a politicians mouth.
I got rid of a bath by chopping it up and putting a bagfull of it in my bin for each collection. Eventually got rid of it over many weeks. This between the time that councils started charging for DIY domestic waste (by claiming it wasn’t domestic’) and the recent change which stops them imposing these charges.
This has turned into quite the “Dumpers Anonymous Confessional”, hasn’t it? You bloody axe maniac you! Or were you more of a Leatherface, in your weapon of destruction choice?
I am pretty sure that they don’t recycle anything like what they claim. I suspect most ends up in landfill. So they have us jumping through all these hoops for nothing. GREEN has to be the most insidious and disgusting political ideology ever imposed on an easily manipulated public, who thought they were living in a free country. —–Once their gas central heating is ripped out and they have 10 plastic bins in their garden some people might actually wake up one day and say “Eh, what is going on here exactly”?
I find the last part of this story particularly vexing. £400 fine for litter picking. My wife does at least an hours litter picking most days. She has early onset AD. If she is fined for putting something in the wrong bin there will be hell to pay.
#excited is trending in the legal community.
My solution is to dig holes and bury it. Keeps you fit digging and yields topsoil to go in raised beds.
I am jusy continuing the practice of the former owner of my home, who was a haulage contractor for a large nearby chemical company. They paid him to take it away and he tipped a lot of the useful bits and pieces in the back garden. For the last three decades it has yielded much useful stuff for an enterprising cheapskate like me.
For a fist full of rubble?
We found an old coal fire back boiler buried in our garden – didn’t know what it was at first.
Hunger games type behaviour, may the odds always be in yr favour.
In Essex visits to waste disposal sites (“recycling centres” in swamp language) requires prior reservation giving phone number, email addreess and vehicle registration number. I have found the staff who check admission allow some leeway on time which is just as well because local roads are often choaked.
Staff in the centre are very interested in metal waste, so much so I wonder if they sell it privately. There is no assistance available for heavy items.
This seems to me just another way of monitoring the public.
Council waste tips have always been obliged to take metal. Yes, I strongly suspect that the staff scavenge and sell-off the good bits. I’m a bit of a car renovation nut – the local guys have got used to me dumping old driveshafts and suchlike.
This level of micro surveillance and stupidity has not yet reached Scotland, as far as I am aware. The response from the typical Jock would likely be far more colourful than awa’ and bile yer heid….
It is sad then that the typical Jock could not manage “awa’ and bile yer heid….” when the Scamdemic and associated nonsense were being rolled out.
No personal criticism intended.
It’s high time everyone told their councils to F themselves. This is rule without consent.
The level of the fine constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment, totally out of order.
How can it even be a crime to put waste in a bin, it’s not industrial quantities of waste, it was one piece of cardboard.
The Highland Council (SNP) is similarly anal about street litter bins, all sorts of threats and incitement to snitch, horrible notices.
Could the FSU help to challenge this or help organise an appeal for funds.
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”
Thomas Sowell
With respect, the people of Brighton shouldn’t complain.
They voted for the greenists.
PS maybe try some direct democracy and sneak out at night and plant some cardboard boxes in the greeny’s bins?
We will soon have a bin that goes out once a year for toe nail clippings. Try not to put it out on the wrong day though or the toe nail wardens will slap you with a heavy fine.
One for the left foot and one for the right.
Years ago (before I retired) after each meal in the company’s dining room we meticulously separated out plastic and polystyrene cups placing them in special containers. One day I happened to be in the service yard where I witnessed the two separate containers being emptied into the back of the same dust cart! After that I made a point of placing plastic cups in the polystyrene container and vice versa.
Simple solution: don’t pay the fine. Inundate the council for evidence of any contract and shower them with FOI requests. Basically, tie them up in legal knots. They’re just out to rob you after all.