Mortality Monitoring in Europe: I see Sweden now in dark blue with a 'very high' death rate last week (week 14) relative to previous years, and compared to its neighbour Norway. Ouch.

Explore the data in detail at this link: https://www.euromomo.eu/index.html

Sweden didn't go for a stay-at-home policy, and have been pretty slack on social distancing. People are pointing to their number of deaths relative to Australia, to 'prove' that our more Draconian measures paid off. So I decided to take Sweden's numbers into perspective.

Relative to the rest of Europe, Sweden's number of deaths aren't particularly remarkable. Especially given that most other countries applied far greater restrictions.

The following is the latest data in deaths per 1 million population:

Spain 446
Italy 391
France 302
Germany 56
UK 243
Turkey 24
Belgium 503
Netherlands 219
Switzerland 165
Ireland 124
Austria 52
Sweden 156
Denmark 63
Norway 32
Luxembourg 120
Greece 11
Iceland 29
Estonia 30
Slovenia 32
Lithuania 14
Monaco 76

Note: The USA, which is often portrayed as a basket case in the mainstream media, has 125 deaths per 1 million population, half in New York State.

There are a number of problems with the data reported on Covid-19.

In some countries, only deaths in hospital are counted. Nursing home deaths and at home deaths don't make it.

Death rates will also vary based on the age of the population and the quality of the health systems.

I'm sure some countries have issues of accuracy. Or confusion over whether a person died of Covi-19 or with Covid-19 and would have died anyway with the underlying health issues.

I suspect some countries with very good numbers, but poor health systems are marking deaths down to other causes if the patient has co-morbidity issues.

The number of confirmed cases varies widely, but that's a poor indicator of anything because we know testing regimes vary widely, and we are discovering a great bomber of asymptomatic and antibody positive in random population testing.
Timothy Birdnow

Jennifer Marohasy discusses the Swedish experiment:

Mortality Monitoring in Europe: I see Sweden now in dark blue with a 'very high' death rate last week (week 14) relative to previous years, and compared to its neighbour Norway. Ouch.

Explore the data in detail at this link: https://www.euromomo.eu/index.html


Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, are outliers (from the countries where we can believe the stats), with deaths below 5 per 1 million population.

All are islands. They are also developed countries with good health systems. Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, didn't have the type of stay at home lock-down Australia and NZ has had.

From here, I have taken an extract from Town hall 15 April 2020 'Israeli Professor Shows Virus Follows Fixed Pattern'

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University, who also serves on the research and development advisory board for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections of the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. The numbers told a shocking story: irrespective of whether the country quarantined like Israel, or went about business as usual like Sweden, coronavirus peaked and subsided in the exact same way. In the exact, same, way. His graphs show that all countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week and rapidly subsiding by the eighth week.

The Wuhan Virus follows its own pattern, he told Mako, an Israeli news agency. It is a fixed pattern that is not dependent on freedom or quarantine. "There is a decline in the number of infections even [in countries] without closures, and it is similar to the countries with closures,” he wrote in his paper.

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel concludes in his analysis summary paper that the data from the past 50 days indicates that the closure policies of the quarantine countries can be replaced by more moderate social distancing policies. The numbers simply do not support quarantine or economic closure.

While the American policies remain less restrictive than those of Israel, it is important to understand the origins of our own "mass hysteria” response. President Trump urged a strong coronavirus response after consulting with Dr. Fauci and his team, who relied on a British model predicting 2.2 million deaths in the United States and 500,000 deaths in the U.K. But that model was developed by Professor Neil Ferguson, who had a history of wildly overestimating death rates through his prediction models. Professor Ferguson was not known for his reliability, and his 2001 disease model was criticized as "not fit for purpose” after it predicted that up to 150,000 people could die in the U.K. from mad cow disease (177 deaths to date). Ferguson’s U.K. coronavirus deaths prediction is now down to 20,000 people, 4% of the original prediction.

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel has mathematically shown us that coronavirus closures were a mistake. It's a tough reality. Americans lost their jobs and businesses went under because the United States, along with most first world nations, acted on the chilling predictions of a severely flawed model, a reading of Professor Ferguson’s tarot cards. Hindsight is 20/20, so we have to be realistic with our criticism. President Trump did not want 2.2 million Americans to die and did what he thought was necessary to save our lives, relying on a model his advisers told him was trustworthy. It's done. It happened. But it doesn't mean that he should continue the course.

https://townhall.com/columnists/marinamedvin/2020/04/15/israeli-professor-shows-virus-follows-fixed-pattern-n2566915?fbclid=IwAR3fhoW3FQ-wDf2Fvx6SYTvnAYqgBg-zEenIASxVzSgFAc_cNe5hKOMd_Gs

Posted by: Dana Mathewson at April 24, 2020 09:58 AM (I3xtz)

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