What are large format links? You mean those large links that I am using on the recap section?
I'm thinking about a separate section in every article to cross link to other people's post on the subject, since I'm having a hard time doing it from within the articles without disturbing the flow.
Oh and thank you, I am glad you like it. I didn't want to fear monger too much here (kept the dog off the cover :D), but there is something very remarkable going on right now.
Great work as usual. If you can stand it, I am pretty sure your skills are in high demand in investment management, banking or consulting for risk adjusted performance attribution and ex-ante risk modelling!
I confess I did some mental gymnastics when I read "If hospitalizatios per case have been increasing much faster than hospitalizations per death, then the CFR must’ve been increasing as well."
Mentally, I eliminated "hospitalizations" from the sentence and arrived at cases/deaths = CFR - which, of course is the inverse of the CFR (deaths/case, usually expressed as deaths per 100k or 1m cases)!
good to see igor active on your thread. not that I am the third head of our own cerberus!
i posted on his stack that the spike protein is the key that unlocks a kraken - whether that is from sars-cov2 virus or from the body making it post injection.
In my (layman's) world - I would be seeing how to put the kraken back in the cage using prison bars made of IgG1 and 3 antibodies, plus using IVM/HCQ/steroids/melatonin protocols as a crude adobe prison cell until i could figure out how to make a maximum security facility!
anyway, hats off to you. very worrying developments (geert was right, it looks like - we might be running into a next variant which is more infectious AND more deadly than any we hve seen thus far.
Yes, I mean, I always read Geert, and with respect for his brilliant work, but put that into the apocalypse end of the outcome spectrum.
We may, (as Churchill might have said) not be at the end of our labours, not even in the middle, but merely at the end of the beginning.
If so, I am fearful of what may come. But it all depends on how fast the damned vaccine is absorbed and mitigated by the human bodies own mysterious defence systems: and that is really unknown. It may be a Trojan Horse, or it may be a damp squib.
It's funny you should say that, Peter. I couldn't work as a physical therapist anymore because I was too proud to get a fake vaccination certificate, so I got busy with financial data. I was in the middle of analyzing the German derivative market (had been scraping daily emmissions for a year), when I realized I was trying to partake in precisely the type of behaviour that got us to this point. I stopped and started getting busy with pharmacovigilance and epidemiological data. My wife left at that point and I can't blame her.
Maybe I will get back to it someday. We will see where this will all lead.
The hospitalization bit was a bit of a mental stretch, admittedly. I actually thought about inverting one of the charts, so it becomes clearer, but it wasn't really essential for understanding what is going on. I could've just as well skipped the hospitalizations per death chart.
I think monoclonal antibodies will do the exact same thing that the vaccines are doing, unless they can provide sterile immunity. I am going to tackle this in another article along with molnupiravir.
Hehe thank you, but it's not talent. It's drive. ;) It just made me feel so helpless seeing how they were twisting the truth and agitating us all. Then there were all these counter narratives I kept falling for. I could never tell who to trust, so looking at primary data was the only option.
Indeed. Regardless, we need to stop jabbing yesterday! And also we must wholeheartedly RESIST the temptation to EVER bring back the other nostrums that we KNOW do far more harm than good, like lockdowns, masks, NPIs, "run death is near", and stuff like that.
Yes. At times I wondered when there would be white crosses painted on the doors of the infected, and red crosses painted on the doors of the unvaccinated refuseniks. It almost came to that: some very well known celebrities were freaking out about having any contact with the unvaxxed: we need to create a Grand Hall Of Shame for them, really.
I was thinking of tackling donations to doctors one of these days. That'll make for a good hall of shame. I have data for almost a million donations that Pfizer made in the past couple of years if I remember correctly.
I hate to shame anyone, but if they are not gonna admit their mistakes so we can heal and acquire some trust into our common future, we have to keep bringing it up.
It would be an interesting webpage design (or art exhibition) to simply have nice professional photo with name of doctor + what they received (like a directory), and every other picture is nice photo of person who was injured or died with name, age, date of shot + date of death.
And yes it seems Geert was right. I could be falling victim to confirmation bias, but I generally change my mind pretty easily when my framwork doesn't suffice to explain what I am seeing and the theoretical foundation he supplies is the only one that explains the data.
Have you seen the Delta article? It's also based on this idea and solves an issue that other epidemiological models are not able to solve.
Very disappointing if German health leaders are weakening their conduct to engage in unethical concealment as well: (regarding "Information about the proportion of people in each federal state who have received a bivalent booster is not made public and neither is the proportion of people who received their 3rd or 4th booster dose made public. The RKI is simply not releasing these data." Let's hope that these intelligent individuals remember their ethical foundation and their obligation to do what's right.
Thank you. I am very glad you like the article. Another reader pointed out that they do release 3rd and 4th booster rates (but not bivalent booster rates), just not in the file I downloaded from their github. It's so hard to work through all these separate datasets. They don't even always use the same names and ID's for regions. It seems like they are intentionally obfuscating the truth through these means. It's very hard to attribute all these little glitches to incompetence.
Jan 30, 2023·edited Jan 31, 2023Liked by Fabian Spieker
Actually, having had to wade through the 'organizing' logic on the websites and document storage systems of German institutions, who you would think would be smart enough and well-funded enough to have sensible structure --- I'm going to say having these materials disorganized is classically German.
Okay, thanks for your input. Maybe I am underestimating the incompetence of the people. However even incomptence is not just coincidence either. Some jobs are just not paid very well. Cut the funding, see the quality of work decline.
Of course that is a possibility. It's just a bid odd that this would happen so abruptly. Look at the last wave and the one before when comparing deaths and cases.
It certainly seems like CFR is impossible to calculate unless we know the case rate in the population. The UK has surveys to determine the case rate regardless of the voluntary testing rate. I wonder if CFR could be calculated using UK data? Another possibility might be sewage testing numbers if they do that in Germany.
Another problem is the difficulty separating COVID deaths from other deaths.
However, if you accept that Basel is close/representative enough, you can see how the absolute Covid viral load in waste water has evolved at that measuring station throughout 2022 until now:
I thought about using positivity rate, but only thought of it after I had posted the article.
If the disease course is shortened we would expect a lower prevalence in waste water as well, but this will still help. I'll see about how I can incorporate this.
None of your links to the CFR data work for me, but assuming it to be true, given 50% of cases are confirmed in hospital vs 10% earlier in year it seems we are back to a stage in the early part of the 2020 pandemic when most cases were being confirmed in hospital and that resulted in a high CFR of 3.4%. When more extensive testing began and more cases were confirmed outside a hospital setting CFR dropped to 0.5%
Same virus, different CFR.
CFR might also be affected by winter, low Vit D levels and high energy prices that have the elderly facing decisions to heat or eat, leaving them in a more unhealthy state
In Taiwan CFR still hovering between 0.15-0.2% but there is talk of not confirming non-serious test positives (most testing done in homes with antigen reports and get confirmed by reporting to health authorities regardless of symptom severity)
We also have to find out whether or not a "mild disease course" is really as mild as they say. For all I know these mild disease courses might be wreaking havoc on the cardiovascular system. I don't think it has been well-established what a mild course really is.
Well, those pushing the COVID narrative and vaccines have plenty of money to fund credible studies showing mild COVID is not so mild, but there are no credible studies. The Long Covid studies are all flawed. So until they show otherwise I am treating mild Covid as a cold, perhaps more dangerous to the elderly than most.
Logically speaking, if the virus is contained to the Upper respiratory tract
I dont see a plausible me mechanism for it to cause long term organ damage. Of course, if the virus makes it to the lungs then its no longer mild covid and I can see possible damage to heart and kidneys in those patients with higher levels of spike in the blood than in a mild confined infection
I made a mistake and posted a correction. Hospitalizatzions were exaggerated by a factor of 7. I apologize for that. A bit embarassing, but it doesn't really change much, since the rate still quintupled.
You may be right. It may just be winter time, less testing etc.
Often times when a highly pathogenic virus becomes less dangerous this is also not due to the virus mutating, but due to susceptible people already having died and immune systems adapting. There are many factors that influence CFR. Ultimately it's just the proportion of cases that die though and sudden changes need an explanation, whatever that may bring up. It may just be the cold weather, it may be due to the bivalent vaccinations or it may have acquired additional means to cause disease.
- Where does the 50% hospitalization rate come from? In the RKI data (Klinische Aspekte, cf. above), the hospitalization rate (among cases where there is data on hospitalization available) has been rising from 2% at the beginning of 2022 to 14% at the end of the year.
- If the Bundesdruckerei is sitting on some data, what might be a good strategy to squeeze it out of them?
- I have been thinking about using the DIVI ICU data (https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/downloads) to compute proxy case rates. When I do this for children, I also get the impression that recently there is either underestimation of case rates, or a more dangerous variant.
Thank you for pointing this out. I edited the article and sent out a correction.
I have talked to a lawyer buddy how we could get a court to order the release of an anonymized dataset from the Bundesdruckerei, but we haven't come up with a plan yet.
Hopefully this will happen once enough people realize that this is why we can not see clearly. To know the impact of vaccinations, we should also have data that is stratified for the same age groups for all variables. The argument against releasing data is usually privacy. It's absolutely ridiculous that hundreds of thousands of Germans are dying, but we can't find out what of because we have to protect people's privacy.
EDIT: Oh and I don't trust the case rates either. I am more interested in the changes over time and what they correlate with than with the absolute figures. Most of it is completely bogus. A good example is school testing and the drops it causes during holiday season. Ridiculous.
Did you know a positive antigen test result MUST be reported, but when the PCR comes up negative the result is not corrected unless the correction arrives at the RKI before Friday 5pm, same week (I might be off with the deadline there, but there is a deadline). Plus, negative PCR tests do NOT have to be reported at all. Ludicrous
"I am more interested in the changes over time and what they correlate with than with the absolute figures." I totally agree! Changes over time = Trends. BUT trends are only reliable if there is consistency in the dataset over time.
I hope I didn't make a mistake there with the hospitalizations when I stretched the array. I will look into this when I'm at my computer. Hope I won't have to edit the article, but will ofc if I slipped up there.
I will definitely look into the divi data again as well. Haven't in a while. Can you explain how you arrived at the conclusion that cases are undestimated?
Jan 29, 2023·edited Jan 29, 2023Liked by Fabian Spieker
Gut getan. Thank you, and well done to provide details on sources and methods. And good call on the WHO's diabolical dog-dubbing.
Do we know how the terms "case" and "COVID-19" are being defined by the people publishing the data you have analyzed? (I followed the link to the OWID CFR link, but it led to a .json page that outwits me).
Well, cases are tricky. Even with a constant definition, the testing habits have a huge influence on the number of cases.
For example when school children were tested positive with an antigen test, the positive result had to be reported by law and the student had to take PCR test to confirm the result. If this PCR test came up negative and the RKI did not receive the negative result before a weekly deadline, the positive antigen test result stays in the dataset. Additionally a negative PCR test result did not have to reported at all.
So it's a mess. Really what I should be doing is look for another variable. Maybe positivity rate? I only thought of this yesterday after I had written the article.
EDIT: I thought OWID had a page where data sources and definitions of their variables were listed. Couldn't find it just now. Ultimately they are bound to the case definition on national level I suppose.
I am also not sure how they handle the delay between new cases and new deaths. Germany for example releases these data on a per patient basis, so you could see which patients died, but it's the most cryptic dataset I've ever seen. I worked through it a year ago, but the code didn't run when I tried a few days ago. If on the other hand I just divide new deaths by new cases, the graph looks similar, just a bit more hectic.
Thank you. I might have made a mistake with hospitalisation rates. Will have to look into this later. If I did, the trend is still the same. I might be exaggerating hospitalisation rates though
Jan 29, 2023·edited Jan 29, 2023Liked by Fabian Spieker
In other news, China's "exit wave" after abandoning their insane Zero Covid policy seems to have finally peaked and crashed, and far less deadly than predicted. Of course, they shunned the mRNA jabs with the notable exceptions of Macau and Hong Kong, preferring their own homegrown inactivated whole virus vaccines instead, and fewer boosters. So that is probably why it was far less disastrous. That, and they are probably still on BA.5 or XBB, before BQ or CH.
Check the examples in the Methods section if you are interested. They seem to have the only working vaccine lol. Or maybe they forge their data, but it looks pretty convincing.
Jan 30, 2023·edited Jan 30, 2023Liked by Fabian Spieker
Indeed. Cuba has their own protein subunit vaccine, with NO mRNA or transfection.
On a related note, Novavax (also a non-transfecting, non-mRNA protein subunit vaccine) in the West should have been the first out the gate, but the sycophantic lackeys for Pfizer and Moderna clearly had other plans.
Don't be so quick to celebrate Novavax without looking into how it's grown. The advertising sounded good but the techniques are just as dangerous. Adding to that, it's utilizing silk-producing insects, which were implicated in a previous biolab disease that also had ties to Texas.
Indeed. Why couldn't they have just used the nucleocapsid or the envelope protein instead of the spike? That would have held up against the variants better, and would have been far less toxic as well, provided that they used a non-toxic or less-toxic adjuvant such as perhaps beta-glucan or thymus peptides. Even plant-based saponins are still better than aluminum as far as adjuvants go.
And these are precisely the questions one asks when the ingredient lists and descriptions are mailed out to hospital staff at the very beginning of vax availability to say, hmm....... something funny is going on here.
Indeed, transfecting the genes of the spike is clearly worse in terms of half-life compared to simply injecting a finite amount of spike. The dose makes the poison, and an effectively infinite dose is worse than a finite dose.
Check the examples in the Methods section if you are interested. They seem to have the only working vaccine. Or maybe they forge their data, but it looks pretty convincing.
As of 2022, Cuba had *10 higher excess deaths (485-550 per 100k) than 'official' COVID-19 deaths, higher than the USA (354-380 per 100k).
I'm leaning towards them forging the data.
It's interesting that Cuba had a lower % of citizens at risk than the USA (13.2% to 16.8% 65+), and what used to be considered a good Heath care system...
Btw, you compared Cuba to Finland. Finland had excess deaths of 218 per 100k, *1.7 of official COVID deaths, with a much older population (23.1% over 65).
Excess deaths indeed tell the final bill when all is said and done. I did not know that they did worse than the USA in terms of excess deaths. (Was that number cumulative?) That is pretty damning indeed for a country touted as a role model for the Global South.
Either their vaccines were not all they were cracked up to be in terms of safety, or effectiveness, or both.
Though the excess deaths may have also been a result of their lockdowns, the embargo, the panic, the isolation, the Foegen Effect from two years straight of mask mandates (!), and/or vaccinating a higher proportion of children compared to the rest of the world.
The more you know, the less Cuba glows. Not to say there aren't some good things about that country.
But in terms of current Covid numbers, if even close to the truth, still seems to bear out that NOT using mRNA jabs is the best way to end the pandemic sooner.
Could be, but I have to be suspicious of any data coming from the Chinese government. Especially if there is any chance that it could chance it could be an embarrassing...
Thank you for these detailed articles! Recently, I have identified some complementary results from Destatis data, e.g. on life expectancy, sex ratios, and temporal and age correlations, which I would like to point out.
With all due respect, the chart at the end is a bit misleading. The case rate globally has dropped while the death rate has risen, of course, but did you adjust for the ~3 week lag between cases and deaths? And with changes in testing rates? The December wave just began to crash, while the death data has not caught up yet, making recent CFR data look much worse than it is?
Thanks. I just checked Our World in Data the other day, looked at the Case Fatality Rate curve for the world, and saw no significant increase in recent weeks or months.
Of course, OWID has long put the CFR at around 1% for a while now, as they seem to calculate it crudely at face value based only on confirmed cases, while we know that the true IFR is a fraction of that, likely 0.1% or lower since Omicron, and 0.2-0.3% in most places before Omicron. (Most infections go undetected.)
In case I misunderstood you, you can link to substack graphics by clicking the graphic in the article so it enlarges, then right click, copy link to image or something, but I am sure you know that.
The lag is taken care of by our world in data. I just smoothed it. That's why I picked another data source for the cfr instead of just dividing deaths by cases.
I honestly hope it's misleading, but I didn't misrepresent it. It was meant as a cue for people to look into what is going on in their countries.
Maybe I should remove it. I could see how that would induce an unnecessary amount of fear for some. Then again, we should be taking this very seriously
Great post Fabian. Very much fitting my yesterday's story.
It is also highly disturbing as to its implications.
It is also upsetting just how much the authorities want to suppress this information.
Do you want to exchange large format links?
Actually hold off, I may link to this article in another piece
What are large format links? You mean those large links that I am using on the recap section?
I'm thinking about a separate section in every article to cross link to other people's post on the subject, since I'm having a hard time doing it from within the articles without disturbing the flow.
Oh and thank you, I am glad you like it. I didn't want to fear monger too much here (kept the dog off the cover :D), but there is something very remarkable going on right now.
Great work as usual. If you can stand it, I am pretty sure your skills are in high demand in investment management, banking or consulting for risk adjusted performance attribution and ex-ante risk modelling!
I confess I did some mental gymnastics when I read "If hospitalizatios per case have been increasing much faster than hospitalizations per death, then the CFR must’ve been increasing as well."
Mentally, I eliminated "hospitalizations" from the sentence and arrived at cases/deaths = CFR - which, of course is the inverse of the CFR (deaths/case, usually expressed as deaths per 100k or 1m cases)!
good to see igor active on your thread. not that I am the third head of our own cerberus!
i posted on his stack that the spike protein is the key that unlocks a kraken - whether that is from sars-cov2 virus or from the body making it post injection.
In my (layman's) world - I would be seeing how to put the kraken back in the cage using prison bars made of IgG1 and 3 antibodies, plus using IVM/HCQ/steroids/melatonin protocols as a crude adobe prison cell until i could figure out how to make a maximum security facility!
anyway, hats off to you. very worrying developments (geert was right, it looks like - we might be running into a next variant which is more infectious AND more deadly than any we hve seen thus far.
Yes, I mean, I always read Geert, and with respect for his brilliant work, but put that into the apocalypse end of the outcome spectrum.
We may, (as Churchill might have said) not be at the end of our labours, not even in the middle, but merely at the end of the beginning.
If so, I am fearful of what may come. But it all depends on how fast the damned vaccine is absorbed and mitigated by the human bodies own mysterious defence systems: and that is really unknown. It may be a Trojan Horse, or it may be a damp squib.
Either way, we need to stop jabbing.
It's funny you should say that, Peter. I couldn't work as a physical therapist anymore because I was too proud to get a fake vaccination certificate, so I got busy with financial data. I was in the middle of analyzing the German derivative market (had been scraping daily emmissions for a year), when I realized I was trying to partake in precisely the type of behaviour that got us to this point. I stopped and started getting busy with pharmacovigilance and epidemiological data. My wife left at that point and I can't blame her.
Maybe I will get back to it someday. We will see where this will all lead.
The hospitalization bit was a bit of a mental stretch, admittedly. I actually thought about inverting one of the charts, so it becomes clearer, but it wasn't really essential for understanding what is going on. I could've just as well skipped the hospitalizations per death chart.
I think monoclonal antibodies will do the exact same thing that the vaccines are doing, unless they can provide sterile immunity. I am going to tackle this in another article along with molnupiravir.
How do you have the talent to have both physical therapist training and then leap to data analysis like this?
Hehe thank you, but it's not talent. It's drive. ;) It just made me feel so helpless seeing how they were twisting the truth and agitating us all. Then there were all these counter narratives I kept falling for. I could never tell who to trust, so looking at primary data was the only option.
There you go!
Whatever you do, your quality has been demonstrated far and wide.
I wish you an ounce (or 6!) of luck plus many flashes of inspiration in turning your hard work into revelations that help everyone.
Thank you, Peter!
You are welcome!
Exactly. We can all agree on that. We need to stop these drugs.
Indeed. Regardless, we need to stop jabbing yesterday! And also we must wholeheartedly RESIST the temptation to EVER bring back the other nostrums that we KNOW do far more harm than good, like lockdowns, masks, NPIs, "run death is near", and stuff like that.
Yes. At times I wondered when there would be white crosses painted on the doors of the infected, and red crosses painted on the doors of the unvaccinated refuseniks. It almost came to that: some very well known celebrities were freaking out about having any contact with the unvaxxed: we need to create a Grand Hall Of Shame for them, really.
I was thinking of tackling donations to doctors one of these days. That'll make for a good hall of shame. I have data for almost a million donations that Pfizer made in the past couple of years if I remember correctly.
I hate to shame anyone, but if they are not gonna admit their mistakes so we can heal and acquire some trust into our common future, we have to keep bringing it up.
It would be an interesting webpage design (or art exhibition) to simply have nice professional photo with name of doctor + what they received (like a directory), and every other picture is nice photo of person who was injured or died with name, age, date of shot + date of death.
That's what I had in mind, without the injuries, but that's a pretty neat idea as well.
Editing: I remember now that it's illegal in Germany for doctors to receive bribes or even gifts worth more than a few euros. Good job Germany.
I've only got data for the USA. :/
About 4 million individual payments with purpose "general" just by Pfizer alone.
So true
Yep! And maybe "shedding" via all the bodies mechanisms!
And yes it seems Geert was right. I could be falling victim to confirmation bias, but I generally change my mind pretty easily when my framwork doesn't suffice to explain what I am seeing and the theoretical foundation he supplies is the only one that explains the data.
Have you seen the Delta article? It's also based on this idea and solves an issue that other epidemiological models are not able to solve.
https://vigilance.pervaers.com/p/modrna-products-caused-the-delta
Excellent thinking.
Very disappointing if German health leaders are weakening their conduct to engage in unethical concealment as well: (regarding "Information about the proportion of people in each federal state who have received a bivalent booster is not made public and neither is the proportion of people who received their 3rd or 4th booster dose made public. The RKI is simply not releasing these data." Let's hope that these intelligent individuals remember their ethical foundation and their obligation to do what's right.
Thank you. I am very glad you like the article. Another reader pointed out that they do release 3rd and 4th booster rates (but not bivalent booster rates), just not in the file I downloaded from their github. It's so hard to work through all these separate datasets. They don't even always use the same names and ID's for regions. It seems like they are intentionally obfuscating the truth through these means. It's very hard to attribute all these little glitches to incompetence.
Actually, having had to wade through the 'organizing' logic on the websites and document storage systems of German institutions, who you would think would be smart enough and well-funded enough to have sensible structure --- I'm going to say having these materials disorganized is classically German.
Okay, thanks for your input. Maybe I am underestimating the incompetence of the people. However even incomptence is not just coincidence either. Some jobs are just not paid very well. Cut the funding, see the quality of work decline.
That rise in CFR is alarming!
Could part of it be that they are testing less?
Of course that is a possibility. It's just a bid odd that this would happen so abruptly. Look at the last wave and the one before when comparing deaths and cases.
It certainly seems like CFR is impossible to calculate unless we know the case rate in the population. The UK has surveys to determine the case rate regardless of the voluntary testing rate. I wonder if CFR could be calculated using UK data? Another possibility might be sewage testing numbers if they do that in Germany.
Another problem is the difficulty separating COVID deaths from other deaths.
The CFR is just the proportion of registered cases that end in death.
However not every infection becomes a case. The infection fatality rate (IFR) can not be determined as easily.
Thanks for the good article.
Maybe the viral load in waste water could (should ?) be considered to get a feeling if the testing is not occurring as often, or if infections are down. There might not be a direct relation between both, but it will give a good idea. I think chapter 3 of https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Situationsberichte/Wochenbericht/Wochenbericht_2023-01-26.pdf?__blob=publicationFile speaks about that, but one would need the absolute figures... which I am not sure are avail. for Germany.
However, if you accept that Basel is close/representative enough, you can see how the absolute Covid viral load in waste water has evolved at that measuring station throughout 2022 until now:
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/epidemiologic/waste-water?wasteWaterGeoValue=diffPrevWeek&rel=abs&wasteWaterFacility=270101&wasteWaterZoomDev=2022-02-07_2023-01-30
You can clearly see the "waves" at that link, and that the current wave (ie end 2022/start 2023) is ca. 8x less than the one of March 2022.
Brilliant, thank you!!
I thought about using positivity rate, but only thought of it after I had posted the article.
If the disease course is shortened we would expect a lower prevalence in waste water as well, but this will still help. I'll see about how I can incorporate this.
Thanks again! :)
Positivity is the key metric for me.
None of your links to the CFR data work for me, but assuming it to be true, given 50% of cases are confirmed in hospital vs 10% earlier in year it seems we are back to a stage in the early part of the 2020 pandemic when most cases were being confirmed in hospital and that resulted in a high CFR of 3.4%. When more extensive testing began and more cases were confirmed outside a hospital setting CFR dropped to 0.5%
Same virus, different CFR.
CFR might also be affected by winter, low Vit D levels and high energy prices that have the elderly facing decisions to heat or eat, leaving them in a more unhealthy state
In Taiwan CFR still hovering between 0.15-0.2% but there is talk of not confirming non-serious test positives (most testing done in homes with antigen reports and get confirmed by reporting to health authorities regardless of symptom severity)
We also have to find out whether or not a "mild disease course" is really as mild as they say. For all I know these mild disease courses might be wreaking havoc on the cardiovascular system. I don't think it has been well-established what a mild course really is.
Well, those pushing the COVID narrative and vaccines have plenty of money to fund credible studies showing mild COVID is not so mild, but there are no credible studies. The Long Covid studies are all flawed. So until they show otherwise I am treating mild Covid as a cold, perhaps more dangerous to the elderly than most.
Logically speaking, if the virus is contained to the Upper respiratory tract
I dont see a plausible me mechanism for it to cause long term organ damage. Of course, if the virus makes it to the lungs then its no longer mild covid and I can see possible damage to heart and kidneys in those patients with higher levels of spike in the blood than in a mild confined infection
I made a mistake and posted a correction. Hospitalizatzions were exaggerated by a factor of 7. I apologize for that. A bit embarassing, but it doesn't really change much, since the rate still quintupled.
You may be right. It may just be winter time, less testing etc.
Often times when a highly pathogenic virus becomes less dangerous this is also not due to the virus mutating, but due to susceptible people already having died and immune systems adapting. There are many factors that influence CFR. Ultimately it's just the proportion of cases that die though and sudden changes need an explanation, whatever that may bring up. It may just be the cold weather, it may be due to the bivalent vaccinations or it may have acquired additional means to cause disease.
I sincerely hope you are wrong. I know in my gut you are not.
If I had a dime for every time I had this exact same thought...
Again, great work. A few remarks:
- The proportion of people who received their 3rd or 4th booster is in the RKI data (https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Daten/Impfquoten-Tab.html), but without differentiation by age group (I guess it's almost completely 60+) and without differentiation by type of booster.
- I don't trust the official case rates. For example, basically all through 2022, the official number of cases (https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Daten/Klinische_Aspekte.html) has been much higher (20%-40%) than the number of positive PCR test results (https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Testzahl.html). Many cases seem to be determined by positive antigen test only. On the other hand, I am sure that there is enormous underreporting (at least I did never report my infections to the authorities...).
- Where does the 50% hospitalization rate come from? In the RKI data (Klinische Aspekte, cf. above), the hospitalization rate (among cases where there is data on hospitalization available) has been rising from 2% at the beginning of 2022 to 14% at the end of the year.
- If the Bundesdruckerei is sitting on some data, what might be a good strategy to squeeze it out of them?
- I have been thinking about using the DIVI ICU data (https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/downloads) to compute proxy case rates. When I do this for children, I also get the impression that recently there is either underestimation of case rates, or a more dangerous variant.
Thank you for pointing this out. I edited the article and sent out a correction.
I have talked to a lawyer buddy how we could get a court to order the release of an anonymized dataset from the Bundesdruckerei, but we haven't come up with a plan yet.
Hopefully this will happen once enough people realize that this is why we can not see clearly. To know the impact of vaccinations, we should also have data that is stratified for the same age groups for all variables. The argument against releasing data is usually privacy. It's absolutely ridiculous that hundreds of thousands of Germans are dying, but we can't find out what of because we have to protect people's privacy.
EDIT: Oh and I don't trust the case rates either. I am more interested in the changes over time and what they correlate with than with the absolute figures. Most of it is completely bogus. A good example is school testing and the drops it causes during holiday season. Ridiculous.
Did you know a positive antigen test result MUST be reported, but when the PCR comes up negative the result is not corrected unless the correction arrives at the RKI before Friday 5pm, same week (I might be off with the deadline there, but there is a deadline). Plus, negative PCR tests do NOT have to be reported at all. Ludicrous
"I am more interested in the changes over time and what they correlate with than with the absolute figures." I totally agree! Changes over time = Trends. BUT trends are only reliable if there is consistency in the dataset over time.
I hope I didn't make a mistake there with the hospitalizations when I stretched the array. I will look into this when I'm at my computer. Hope I won't have to edit the article, but will ofc if I slipped up there.
I will definitely look into the divi data again as well. Haven't in a while. Can you explain how you arrived at the conclusion that cases are undestimated?
I can and will, but in a separate post, diagrams and all. Might take a few days.
Gut getan. Thank you, and well done to provide details on sources and methods. And good call on the WHO's diabolical dog-dubbing.
Do we know how the terms "case" and "COVID-19" are being defined by the people publishing the data you have analyzed? (I followed the link to the OWID CFR link, but it led to a .json page that outwits me).
Well, cases are tricky. Even with a constant definition, the testing habits have a huge influence on the number of cases.
For example when school children were tested positive with an antigen test, the positive result had to be reported by law and the student had to take PCR test to confirm the result. If this PCR test came up negative and the RKI did not receive the negative result before a weekly deadline, the positive antigen test result stays in the dataset. Additionally a negative PCR test result did not have to reported at all.
So it's a mess. Really what I should be doing is look for another variable. Maybe positivity rate? I only thought of this yesterday after I had written the article.
EDIT: I thought OWID had a page where data sources and definitions of their variables were listed. Couldn't find it just now. Ultimately they are bound to the case definition on national level I suppose.
I am also not sure how they handle the delay between new cases and new deaths. Germany for example releases these data on a per patient basis, so you could see which patients died, but it's the most cryptic dataset I've ever seen. I worked through it a year ago, but the code didn't run when I tried a few days ago. If on the other hand I just divide new deaths by new cases, the graph looks similar, just a bit more hectic.
Thank you. I have also just listened to the latest from John Beaudoin and Chris Martenson...
https://coquindechien.substack.com/p/we-the-people-want-the-vax-dates?utm_medium=ios
https://rumble.com/v2a7wtk-john-beaudoin-500000-death-certificates-tell-of-signals-fraud-and-unlawful-.html
https://rumble.com/v257tpw-john-beaudoin-exposes-truth-of-covid-deaths-from-medical-records-live.html
https://youtu.be/HhHJ51FJC2w
oh dear.. that's one trajectory
Tanks à lot. An error for the first of the three links for immune tolérance ?
I checked the links just now and they are all working. It is the same article that is discussing both T cell and antibody mediated immunity.
In that case it is the same as the second of I remember correctly. Thank you, I will edit this
excellent analysis. very thorough. thank you.
Thank you. I might have made a mistake with hospitalisation rates. Will have to look into this later. If I did, the trend is still the same. I might be exaggerating hospitalisation rates though
In other news, China's "exit wave" after abandoning their insane Zero Covid policy seems to have finally peaked and crashed, and far less deadly than predicted. Of course, they shunned the mRNA jabs with the notable exceptions of Macau and Hong Kong, preferring their own homegrown inactivated whole virus vaccines instead, and fewer boosters. So that is probably why it was far less disastrous. That, and they are probably still on BA.5 or XBB, before BQ or CH.
Have you looked at the Cuban data?
https://vigilance.pervaers.com/p/boosters-are-prolonging-the-pandemic
Check the examples in the Methods section if you are interested. They seem to have the only working vaccine lol. Or maybe they forge their data, but it looks pretty convincing.
Indeed. Cuba has their own protein subunit vaccine, with NO mRNA or transfection.
On a related note, Novavax (also a non-transfecting, non-mRNA protein subunit vaccine) in the West should have been the first out the gate, but the sycophantic lackeys for Pfizer and Moderna clearly had other plans.
Don't be so quick to celebrate Novavax without looking into how it's grown. The advertising sounded good but the techniques are just as dangerous. Adding to that, it's utilizing silk-producing insects, which were implicated in a previous biolab disease that also had ties to Texas.
Yeah I didn't want to start a discussion since information is sparse, but it looks to me like Novavax is every bit as bad.
Ultimately it boils down to the question: Do you want to have a fully functional pathogenic viral protein circulating through your bloodstream?
https://www.pervaers.com/?v=NOV
6% with chest pain, 4% with palpitations... Haven't stratified for infection status though. These might all be reports with "breakthrough" infections.
Indeed. Why couldn't they have just used the nucleocapsid or the envelope protein instead of the spike? That would have held up against the variants better, and would have been far less toxic as well, provided that they used a non-toxic or less-toxic adjuvant such as perhaps beta-glucan or thymus peptides. Even plant-based saponins are still better than aluminum as far as adjuvants go.
I don't think the other structural proteins are exposed enough, but I'm not sure.
And these are precisely the questions one asks when the ingredient lists and descriptions are mailed out to hospital staff at the very beginning of vax availability to say, hmm....... something funny is going on here.
Indeed, I am pretty wary of Novavax too. The best one could say is it is perhaps a shade less bad than the gene therapy jabs.
Yeah I was exaggerating when I said "every bit as bad". It couldn't come close in terms of half-life.
Indeed, transfecting the genes of the spike is clearly worse in terms of half-life compared to simply injecting a finite amount of spike. The dose makes the poison, and an effectively infinite dose is worse than a finite dose.
Do you have any Data for Cuba?
https://vigilance.pervaers.com/p/boosters-are-prolonging-the-pandemic
Check the examples in the Methods section if you are interested. They seem to have the only working vaccine. Or maybe they forge their data, but it looks pretty convincing.
All based on OWID data.
And why do you recommend that we trust this data?
As of 2022, Cuba had *10 higher excess deaths (485-550 per 100k) than 'official' COVID-19 deaths, higher than the USA (354-380 per 100k).
I'm leaning towards them forging the data.
It's interesting that Cuba had a lower % of citizens at risk than the USA (13.2% to 16.8% 65+), and what used to be considered a good Heath care system...
Btw, you compared Cuba to Finland. Finland had excess deaths of 218 per 100k, *1.7 of official COVID deaths, with a much older population (23.1% over 65).
Excess deaths indeed tell the final bill when all is said and done. I did not know that they did worse than the USA in terms of excess deaths. (Was that number cumulative?) That is pretty damning indeed for a country touted as a role model for the Global South.
Either their vaccines were not all they were cracked up to be in terms of safety, or effectiveness, or both.
Though the excess deaths may have also been a result of their lockdowns, the embargo, the panic, the isolation, the Foegen Effect from two years straight of mask mandates (!), and/or vaccinating a higher proportion of children compared to the rest of the world.
The more you know, the less Cuba glows. Not to say there aren't some good things about that country.
But in terms of current Covid numbers, if even close to the truth, still seems to bear out that NOT using mRNA jabs is the best way to end the pandemic sooner.
Could be, but I have to be suspicious of any data coming from the Chinese government. Especially if there is any chance that it could chance it could be an embarrassing...
Thank you for these detailed articles! Recently, I have identified some complementary results from Destatis data, e.g. on life expectancy, sex ratios, and temporal and age correlations, which I would like to point out.
https://ulflorr.substack.com/
Oh a new substacker, welcome! :)
Excellent observation you made there. I will see if I can demonstrate this for US data as well.
With all due respect, the chart at the end is a bit misleading. The case rate globally has dropped while the death rate has risen, of course, but did you adjust for the ~3 week lag between cases and deaths? And with changes in testing rates? The December wave just began to crash, while the death data has not caught up yet, making recent CFR data look much worse than it is?
Do you think I should remove the worldwide CFR graph? I was hesitant to even include it.
Yes, you probably should remove it for now.
Ok I will. Bit late. I only saw your comment now...
Thanks. I just checked Our World in Data the other day, looked at the Case Fatality Rate curve for the world, and saw no significant increase in recent weeks or months.
Of course, OWID has long put the CFR at around 1% for a while now, as they seem to calculate it crudely at face value based only on confirmed cases, while we know that the true IFR is a fraction of that, likely 0.1% or lower since Omicron, and 0.2-0.3% in most places before Omicron. (Most infections go undetected.)
I think it's misleading without accounting for variation in testing.
Removing it.
It has recovered a little anyway:
https://substack.pervaers.com/misc/Untitled-7.png
How do you create links to graphics within substack?
(I posted some graphics under your Twitter post.)
Oh that link is on my website, http://pervaers.com
Check it out, it's chart pornography. :D
In case I misunderstood you, you can link to substack graphics by clicking the graphic in the article so it enlarges, then right click, copy link to image or something, but I am sure you know that.
The lag is taken care of by our world in data. I just smoothed it. That's why I picked another data source for the cfr instead of just dividing deaths by cases.
I honestly hope it's misleading, but I didn't misrepresent it. It was meant as a cue for people to look into what is going on in their countries.
Maybe I should remove it. I could see how that would induce an unnecessary amount of fear for some. Then again, we should be taking this very seriously