So, there is this article from Financial Times making the rounds titled “Hong Kong Omicron deaths expose limits of fraying zero-Covid policy”, which is a bit of a mouthful, but it certainly piques the interest, don’t you think? But, no, it is not an anti-lockdown ballad; rather, the article is aimed at convincing the reader that Hong Kong’s great failure was both not vaccinating enough and using the wrong vaccines.
Lying only ever begets more trouble, especially when people having to work using skewed or fraudulent or even misleading data make their decisions based on them.
In Sweden, the majority of Covid deaths as confirmed by post-mortem testing, was elderly with at least one other comorbid factor such as diabetes or hypertension et c - and migrants from MENA and Africa, especially somalis and ethiopians (seems viruses and biology doesn't care for liberal "there are no biological racial differences"...) which sustained a lot more ICU-cases and deaths than their numbers should have, all else being equal.
And when looking at the remaining casualties, virtually all of them have comorbidities such as being immunocompromised or being morbidly obese (the idiom/colloquialism for that being "as fat as an american"). The number of cases where an otherwise healthy normal person has gotten Covid and died from Covid infection, is in double digits or fewer.
I wonder what the NZ/HK figures looks like when such things are factored. What're the rates of COPD in NZ and HK respectively, for example?
Building on that question, what are the rates of COPD, or other leading comorbidites in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations in general? I call these "edge cases" because small variations in these rates have enormous impacts on efficacy against death. People who cannot get vaccinated due to their underlying conditions (ie., cancer) are naturally going to cause a disproportionate skew in the numbers. Sadly, no one with access to that level of data seems interested in looking into this question. Most studies only seem to control for weak proxies of comorbidites like age, but age is a terrible control in my opinion. A lot of these comorbidities affect people of all ages and if we herd them all into the category unvaccinated, of course the unvaccinated are going to look worse.
Speaking from memory, not having any data in front of me (and anything relating to migration, race and culture unless being purely panegyrical is virtually impossible to find) the issues are these:
They have no cultural history of it being a social virtue to be outdoors, partaking in winter sports and so on - kind of obvious seeing where they hail from. Their pigmentation being geared to protect from sunlight means here where we have winter up to 4-5 months of the year depending on where you look, they rapidly develop vitamin D definiency to the point of needing nutritional supplements.
And since there are issues of IQ (typically in the 60-70 range for an average somali male compared to a swedish male's 100 average), education or lack there of, analphabetism, distrust of authorities (again, quite understandable given experience from their homelands) and that they persist in eating the same way they did in Africa all adds up to far greater vulnerability to all kinds of diseases.
Swedes like me typically go skiing, ice skating, hiking, ice fishing, and also work outdoors during winter. 95% of africans living in sweden dwell in the three major urban areas, and stay indoors half the year. As one senegalese man I used to meet at the gym often remarked: "It is always very cold here!" - meaning he wore a winter jacket in April, in the southernmost part of Sweden, it being +20C there at the time.
Our summer highs of maybe +28C for a week or two tops are after all their normal temeperature, while our winter with maybe four hours of daylight in the middle of Sweden (and much less than that in the northern third of the country) frequently sees -25C for days or weeks on end.
We live slightly north of the 61st parallel. That's the Great Slave Lake in Canada, and 3/5s of Sweden is north of here. I'm guessing you're from the US? New York City (acc. o Wiki) sits on the 40th parallel north, and Mogadishu is Somalia is on the 2nd parallel north - ain't no wonder they have problems. I'd have the same if I tried to live there.
So it's a lot of factors playing into it, and as I said, since it's related to race etc. it's a hot steaming PC-mess of rotten potatoes.
Indeed, I am in the US, with northern European (but not Scandinavian) genetics. I'm also aware that above roughly the 35th parallel, it doesn't matter how much time you spend outside in the winter, the sun just isn't high enough in the sky to produce much vitamin D. There's a reason your grandmother wanted you to take cod liver oil. :)
All hail the mighty Cod, saviour of children for ages without end!
It is still standard practice here to give children cod liver oil during their first years, though it's called "AD-drops" to make it seem like fancy modern medicaments. Unfortunately, migrants from MENA and Africa stick to their homeland cuisines and culture, so many of them rarely leaves the home at all during winter.
Honestly, it is a compelling graph that I am sure the vaccine enthusiasts want to be true. The main problem seems to be shifting the cases forward 18 days based on "research", which means instead of 1000+ cases per 100k showing up for Hong Kong, they wound up with 100, which conveniently tells the story they wanted to... sneaky, but unsurprising at this point.
Lying only ever begets more trouble, especially when people having to work using skewed or fraudulent or even misleading data make their decisions based on them.
In Sweden, the majority of Covid deaths as confirmed by post-mortem testing, was elderly with at least one other comorbid factor such as diabetes or hypertension et c - and migrants from MENA and Africa, especially somalis and ethiopians (seems viruses and biology doesn't care for liberal "there are no biological racial differences"...) which sustained a lot more ICU-cases and deaths than their numbers should have, all else being equal.
And when looking at the remaining casualties, virtually all of them have comorbidities such as being immunocompromised or being morbidly obese (the idiom/colloquialism for that being "as fat as an american"). The number of cases where an otherwise healthy normal person has gotten Covid and died from Covid infection, is in double digits or fewer.
I wonder what the NZ/HK figures looks like when such things are factored. What're the rates of COPD in NZ and HK respectively, for example?
Building on that question, what are the rates of COPD, or other leading comorbidites in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations in general? I call these "edge cases" because small variations in these rates have enormous impacts on efficacy against death. People who cannot get vaccinated due to their underlying conditions (ie., cancer) are naturally going to cause a disproportionate skew in the numbers. Sadly, no one with access to that level of data seems interested in looking into this question. Most studies only seem to control for weak proxies of comorbidites like age, but age is a terrible control in my opinion. A lot of these comorbidities affect people of all ages and if we herd them all into the category unvaccinated, of course the unvaccinated are going to look worse.
I wonder what a typical Somali immigrant's vitamin D levels are like after a few years in Scandinavia?
Speaking from memory, not having any data in front of me (and anything relating to migration, race and culture unless being purely panegyrical is virtually impossible to find) the issues are these:
They have no cultural history of it being a social virtue to be outdoors, partaking in winter sports and so on - kind of obvious seeing where they hail from. Their pigmentation being geared to protect from sunlight means here where we have winter up to 4-5 months of the year depending on where you look, they rapidly develop vitamin D definiency to the point of needing nutritional supplements.
And since there are issues of IQ (typically in the 60-70 range for an average somali male compared to a swedish male's 100 average), education or lack there of, analphabetism, distrust of authorities (again, quite understandable given experience from their homelands) and that they persist in eating the same way they did in Africa all adds up to far greater vulnerability to all kinds of diseases.
Swedes like me typically go skiing, ice skating, hiking, ice fishing, and also work outdoors during winter. 95% of africans living in sweden dwell in the three major urban areas, and stay indoors half the year. As one senegalese man I used to meet at the gym often remarked: "It is always very cold here!" - meaning he wore a winter jacket in April, in the southernmost part of Sweden, it being +20C there at the time.
Our summer highs of maybe +28C for a week or two tops are after all their normal temeperature, while our winter with maybe four hours of daylight in the middle of Sweden (and much less than that in the northern third of the country) frequently sees -25C for days or weeks on end.
We live slightly north of the 61st parallel. That's the Great Slave Lake in Canada, and 3/5s of Sweden is north of here. I'm guessing you're from the US? New York City (acc. o Wiki) sits on the 40th parallel north, and Mogadishu is Somalia is on the 2nd parallel north - ain't no wonder they have problems. I'd have the same if I tried to live there.
So it's a lot of factors playing into it, and as I said, since it's related to race etc. it's a hot steaming PC-mess of rotten potatoes.
Indeed, I am in the US, with northern European (but not Scandinavian) genetics. I'm also aware that above roughly the 35th parallel, it doesn't matter how much time you spend outside in the winter, the sun just isn't high enough in the sky to produce much vitamin D. There's a reason your grandmother wanted you to take cod liver oil. :)
All hail the mighty Cod, saviour of children for ages without end!
It is still standard practice here to give children cod liver oil during their first years, though it's called "AD-drops" to make it seem like fancy modern medicaments. Unfortunately, migrants from MENA and Africa stick to their homeland cuisines and culture, so many of them rarely leaves the home at all during winter.
Thank you for doing this analysis. When I first saw those graphs on Twitter, I could not believe what they were showing.
Honestly, it is a compelling graph that I am sure the vaccine enthusiasts want to be true. The main problem seems to be shifting the cases forward 18 days based on "research", which means instead of 1000+ cases per 100k showing up for Hong Kong, they wound up with 100, which conveniently tells the story they wanted to... sneaky, but unsurprising at this point.
We need to look at Hong Kong very closely.