V minulém článku jsem se snažil představit analýzu celkové úmrtnosti v Německu mezi lety 2012 - 2022, tedy včetně pandemických let 2020 a 2021. Velmi mě překvapilo zjištění, že se úmrtnost oproti normálu nezvýšila - nejvyšší nárůst zaznamenalo Německo dokonce v roce 2015.
In follow-up to my lengthy comment on Ians page [1], thought I would quickly weigh in on your post here as well as pick your brain on what you are seeing across the Atlantic.
For background, I live in Cleveland, Ohio, a city of 300K in a metro area of 3 million, in a state of 10 million, which is roughly 25% bigger in area than Czech Republic by my quick math.
I read through your post via Google Translate, and seems we are both wondering about similar things, coming to similar theories, asking similar questions. I have next to zero knowledge of your country, Germany, etc outside of basics so indulge and forgive my American ignorance.
I'll just quickly share my thoughts as an American, and you can tell me if any of this makes sense to what you are seeing.
I am a devout skeptic, so in early 2020 I was doubting Covid hysteria. I saw the same hysteria attempted my whole life (I'm 43), especially in the 00's after we developed tests to find things that were always there but we just couldn't see. They (Media) got spooked with SARS03, H1N1, MERS, Ebola, Zika, etc - yet all of them flamed out.
And that made sense. Viruses have been on this planet 3.8 billion years. They have been mingling with mammals for 360 million years. With our early hominid ancestors for 4 million years. With modern day homo-sapiens of 300,000 years.
The premise that now, after 4 million years, all the sudden a Coronavirus magically appeared this deadly, is arrogant and ridiculous. It reminds of the religious cults who always predict that the apocalypse is going to happen in their lifetime, and soon! Not in 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years, but next year! It's arrogant to think we are special enough to be around for such an event.
That said, I had no idea that in fact we (the US, China) had been spending the last 15 years trying to make Coronaviruses more infectious so we could study how to fight them in case someday in the future they evolved... to become more infectious... like the ones we were making.
It's the most fucking retarded idea in recent history. I didn't even believe we could be so fucking stupid and dismissed this as a "conspiracy theory" early in 2020 (and social media would in fact, prevent me from seeing this was common knowledge and not a conspiracy). After reading Alina Chan's "Viral", or Katherine Eban's journalism, it's hard to ignore that Occam's Razor fact that this virus was created in a lab, with good intentions, and accidentally leaked, just as many other viruses had leaked before. Idiots.
Anyway, so that is my first point, we do have to now consider the chance that we are actually dealing with a slightly more deadly virus than we would normally find in nature. Fortunately it isn't that deadly unless you are very old, sick, and obese. So far.
So in your analysis and comparison of Germany to the CR, how do the population demographics differ? Wouldn't the population of CR be closer to Slovakia than Germany? The former has similar high all cause mortality rates.
Is the population of CR more obese, hypertensive, and elderly than Germany? (I honestly have no idea - this is a genuine question).
Here in the US, all the rumors are true :) We are generally a very obese population, plagued with hypertension, diabetes, lethargy.. etc.
To compensate we have been developing medical ways to extend the lives of these unhealthy people. I'm married to a Vascular Surgeon, which I used to jokingly refer to as a "life extension specialist" as every day she is extending the lives of people who 30 - 50 years ago would have died from the conditions they present. Stenosis of your Carotid artery used to kill you from stroke back in the day, now she can perform a Carotid Enterectomy and buy you more time. An enlargement of your Aortic Artery would lead to an eventual death sentence. Now, if caught, you get more years. If it ruptures, you even might survive (low odds) if you happen to live in a city with a good vascular surgeon who gets you under the knife quickly. Feet and legs turning black from your diabetes? Our amputation techniques are better. Our antibiotics to prevent infection are better. Our prosthetics to help mobility are better.
It doesn't stop there. We have statins to lower blood pressure. Dulaglutide to lower blood sugar. Better cancer drugs. Better antivirals. Less invasive surgical techniques. Better cancer drugs.
In short, we have found ways to prop up people who would in the past typically not made it to their 50's, 60', 70's, 80's.
Now we have created a large population of people who are otherwise unhealthy, but alive and (mostly) enjoying life. It's great news.
But we shouldn't be surprised when a bad influenza-like-illness (ILI, the term we use in the US for flu, coronaviruses, RSV, etc) hits this demographic and more people die "than usual".
Suppose we take the argument that this is a natural virus, not created in a lab, what would have happened if a similar virus hit us in 1950? Given our population was much younger, and the ones who were elderly much healthier (survival bias) than present population, might a theoretical COVID-50 similar in strength to COVID-19 done to 1950s America what it did to 2020's Africa? Nothing at all? If there isn't the demographic available to hit (obese elderly) then we wouldn't even know it was there.
To your point, how much of our reaction to Covid is responsible for the excess mortality the past two years?
Your country is similar to the US in excess mortality, and what you write about sounds similar to our response.
Unfortunately getting to the bottom of this question is nearly impossible because:
1) The reasons are diverse, the variables infinite, the explanations complex. I think the public prefers short and simple which is why simplistic narratives hold sway (one extreme is the virus is the greatest threat to humanity, the other extreme is that it is 100% due to our response and vaccines - these extremes have appeal in their simplicity while the truth is almost certainly in the middle and far more nuanced). This means the simpler answers likely become the dominant ones regardless of truthfulness or veracity - at least in short term, which in our case may mean years to decades.
2) Disinterestedness is one of the most important foundations of scientific thought yet completely missing and dead today. A true scientist should have no preference in the outcome of experiment, should not care whether a mask works or doesn't, whether lockdowns hurt or help. The true scientist should be as removed from the outcome as an alien might be studying our species today a million years from now.
Everyone has bias of course, so reaching a true state of disinterested is impossible, but when politics, your career, and your reputation are intrinsically tied to your scientific output, it's nearly impossible to backtrack from your pet theories, admit error, and be open to being wrong. "The Science" has been shaped the past 100 years to create an inefficient system of output which is why we are in the replication crisis.
Especially for elected and appointed officials, saying you were wrong is a death wish for your career. No matter how obvious the error, you have to continually double down, make excuses, create unfalsifiable explanations. Here in the United States we saw this the War in Vietnam, the War on Drugs, The War on Terror, and now the War on Viruses.
This is what we are up against. The days of a William Farr realizing he was wrong and discarding his pet theory for John Snows seem to be over.
The greater the attention, the less inclined I think public health experts will be to admit error. Perhaps if William Farr had a 2 million following on Twitter back in the 1860's he would have been reluctant to admit Miasma was wrong. I can't see these people admitting they screwed up and are responsible for the 120,000 excess accidental deaths we had in the US the last 2 years. I can't see them acknowledging that lockdowns in New York City immediately caused 4,500 more heart attacks in a 9 week period than expected in spring of 2020.
I lean to where it seems you have arrived - the more disruption which occurred to healthcare and our normal social patterns, the greater the losses - these disruptions had complicated impacts which vary state to state, country to country, culture to culture. I'm fascinated to continue to study it, disinterestedly as possible.
Hello to Ohio! I hope everything is going well there. I will try my best, to briefly summarize all information which I gather over last two years.
Czech Republic and Germany are very similar. Historically we share the same genotype, weather, food, beer, history and culture. We are pretty similar to Germans, and there are many people living in Germany or commuting there for work. Due to this similarity, I would expect the virus to have the same effect on both countries. That did not happen.
We can speculate on reasons why, but the main point is, that if the virus is the cause of death, then it should affect both countries the same. With no exception. There should be no borders for biological virus, and it should spread organically. Another interesting fact is, that Germany is claiming more than 130,000 deaths on this virus, even though that all-caused mortality has not increased this much at all. This fact is leading me to conclusion, that the true cause of excessive deaths is due to the restrictions and consequently the collapse of healthcare. It's not the virus, but the interventions which caused the deaths of the people. See here - causes of deaths for 2020: https://ibb.co/XWgqJDb
The origin of the virus is also interesting. The same person who is chief of the USA pandemic response, Dr. Fauci is the same who financed the research for coronaviruses in Wuhan via EcoHealthAlliance. I don't think it's just a coincidence. As well as the so called PCR test and all coordinated restrictions which happened around the world.
Especially, in the Czech Republic, our scientists pointed out that the sequence of the virus seems to be modified by artificial intervention very soon. They also offered different type of test than PCR for lower price to identify this virus. It has been rejected by government officials and mocked as an unscientific approach. Those scientists have also been persecuted in media and heavily censored. There was no effort to really treat the people, the orders were to create many cases as possible.
About the pandemic response, I have by my self watched online the Event 201 held in New York in autumn 2019, where they exercised pandemic of so-called "CARS". This pandemic of coronavirus should originate in Latin America from pigs and spread rapidly. About 6 months after this, they made this exercise reality. That's also not coincidence.
As can be seen from above, there are many things which seems to be staged. In my opinion, someone planned to impose the lockdown, and they just need some justification for that, which was in this case the virus, which they probably made by themselves and spread around on purpose to create chaos and panic. I would be happy to think otherwise, but all facts point to this and if someone doesn't have any other explanation, it seems more and more possible.
Lengthy reply incoming, but probably won't finish it until tonight/tomorrow. In the meantime I will offer some feedback on this point you made:
Explorer: "We can speculate on reasons why, but the main point is, that if the virus is the cause of death, then it should affect both countries the same. With no exception. There should be no borders for biological virus, and it should spread organically"
Theoretically yes. In practice it would depend nearly entirely on the elderly and their general health and living conditions. Germany and CR could be 99% similar but if it happened that in the CR the average 80 year old was more obese and hypertensive than the average German, that single difference could mean the difference of 1,000 and 10,000 deaths.
If, for example, the elderly in the CR tend to live in cramped nursing homes with poorer care than their German counterparts, that could explain a massive difference of outcome.
Here, in the US, there are massive gaps in outcome between various states, cities, and demographics.
Our media likes to portray the fact that minorities are dying at much higher rates due to systemic racism, lack of access to healthcare, but it ignores two unfortunate differences that aren't directly tied to anything other than wealth.
1) The poor tend to live in cramped nursing homes with much worse nurses and staff.
2) The poor (and this is something that is taboo to talk about) tend to have families that keep elderly relatives who should probably have died alive as long as possible so they can draw off their welfare checks. This is something I only realized because my wife used to work at a hospital serving underprivileged communities and would be dismayed how many life extending surgeries she would be requested to perform on people who are completely out of it, their mind gone, just living life in a wheelchair staring out a window. But that empty life was still drawing a welfare check which so their family kept asking my wife to keep them alive.
I don't know anything about the social structure for Germany and the CR, but if there are any differences like this it may shed light on what is going on.
I fully agree with you - the difference is in money and support in healthcare. Germany has always paid better for doctors and nurses, and due to that it was able to handle the overwhelming of hospitals well. Here due to the chaos which they made, the doctors and nurses were scared and also overwhelmed, so they didn't have enough capacity to handle that. That's only reason, why there was excess-mortality. The hospitals were overwhelmed and didn't have enough personal for normal working capacity due to the restrictions.
The restrictions and the lockdown caused the excess-deaths. Without that there would be normal flue season and the hospitals would handle that. It was only the politicians, corruption and media who made this excess mortality.
I can not express my ideas so well, but this article does that for me. I fully agree with all what is written there, and it just summarizes the whole 2,5 year experience which we all had.
I agree with everything she said. I am surprised though that shes leaving New Jersey now, as I expect the hysteria is in it's final throes. I'm two state over from her and it's relegated to just a few masked people here and there that look like weirdos. Geographically and culturally, it's a pretty giant move to move from New Jersey to Texas - so this is a pretty big deal.
It's done and I think most politicians are trying to distance themselves from Covid policies as elections are coming up. I bet NJ returns to normal pretty soon. Question is, will they try this shit again?
I doubt it. I think it has become so obviously bad that everyone will try to pretend then never supported the measures but defend certain ones as having been "appropriate" at that time. Kinda like how the War on Terror was marketed by the media and then they pretended they were always against it.
The longer reply I was working on but got distracted was more focused on discussing how much of this was planned vs a mass hysteria event.
Do you read Chris Bray on substack? He's excellent - I bet you would like him.
In follow-up to my lengthy comment on Ians page [1], thought I would quickly weigh in on your post here as well as pick your brain on what you are seeing across the Atlantic.
For background, I live in Cleveland, Ohio, a city of 300K in a metro area of 3 million, in a state of 10 million, which is roughly 25% bigger in area than Czech Republic by my quick math.
I read through your post via Google Translate, and seems we are both wondering about similar things, coming to similar theories, asking similar questions. I have next to zero knowledge of your country, Germany, etc outside of basics so indulge and forgive my American ignorance.
I'll just quickly share my thoughts as an American, and you can tell me if any of this makes sense to what you are seeing.
I am a devout skeptic, so in early 2020 I was doubting Covid hysteria. I saw the same hysteria attempted my whole life (I'm 43), especially in the 00's after we developed tests to find things that were always there but we just couldn't see. They (Media) got spooked with SARS03, H1N1, MERS, Ebola, Zika, etc - yet all of them flamed out.
And that made sense. Viruses have been on this planet 3.8 billion years. They have been mingling with mammals for 360 million years. With our early hominid ancestors for 4 million years. With modern day homo-sapiens of 300,000 years.
The premise that now, after 4 million years, all the sudden a Coronavirus magically appeared this deadly, is arrogant and ridiculous. It reminds of the religious cults who always predict that the apocalypse is going to happen in their lifetime, and soon! Not in 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years, but next year! It's arrogant to think we are special enough to be around for such an event.
That said, I had no idea that in fact we (the US, China) had been spending the last 15 years trying to make Coronaviruses more infectious so we could study how to fight them in case someday in the future they evolved... to become more infectious... like the ones we were making.
It's the most fucking retarded idea in recent history. I didn't even believe we could be so fucking stupid and dismissed this as a "conspiracy theory" early in 2020 (and social media would in fact, prevent me from seeing this was common knowledge and not a conspiracy). After reading Alina Chan's "Viral", or Katherine Eban's journalism, it's hard to ignore that Occam's Razor fact that this virus was created in a lab, with good intentions, and accidentally leaked, just as many other viruses had leaked before. Idiots.
Anyway, so that is my first point, we do have to now consider the chance that we are actually dealing with a slightly more deadly virus than we would normally find in nature. Fortunately it isn't that deadly unless you are very old, sick, and obese. So far.
So in your analysis and comparison of Germany to the CR, how do the population demographics differ? Wouldn't the population of CR be closer to Slovakia than Germany? The former has similar high all cause mortality rates.
Is the population of CR more obese, hypertensive, and elderly than Germany? (I honestly have no idea - this is a genuine question).
Here in the US, all the rumors are true :) We are generally a very obese population, plagued with hypertension, diabetes, lethargy.. etc.
To compensate we have been developing medical ways to extend the lives of these unhealthy people. I'm married to a Vascular Surgeon, which I used to jokingly refer to as a "life extension specialist" as every day she is extending the lives of people who 30 - 50 years ago would have died from the conditions they present. Stenosis of your Carotid artery used to kill you from stroke back in the day, now she can perform a Carotid Enterectomy and buy you more time. An enlargement of your Aortic Artery would lead to an eventual death sentence. Now, if caught, you get more years. If it ruptures, you even might survive (low odds) if you happen to live in a city with a good vascular surgeon who gets you under the knife quickly. Feet and legs turning black from your diabetes? Our amputation techniques are better. Our antibiotics to prevent infection are better. Our prosthetics to help mobility are better.
It doesn't stop there. We have statins to lower blood pressure. Dulaglutide to lower blood sugar. Better cancer drugs. Better antivirals. Less invasive surgical techniques. Better cancer drugs.
In short, we have found ways to prop up people who would in the past typically not made it to their 50's, 60', 70's, 80's.
Now we have created a large population of people who are otherwise unhealthy, but alive and (mostly) enjoying life. It's great news.
But we shouldn't be surprised when a bad influenza-like-illness (ILI, the term we use in the US for flu, coronaviruses, RSV, etc) hits this demographic and more people die "than usual".
Suppose we take the argument that this is a natural virus, not created in a lab, what would have happened if a similar virus hit us in 1950? Given our population was much younger, and the ones who were elderly much healthier (survival bias) than present population, might a theoretical COVID-50 similar in strength to COVID-19 done to 1950s America what it did to 2020's Africa? Nothing at all? If there isn't the demographic available to hit (obese elderly) then we wouldn't even know it was there.
To your point, how much of our reaction to Covid is responsible for the excess mortality the past two years?
Your country is similar to the US in excess mortality, and what you write about sounds similar to our response.
Unfortunately getting to the bottom of this question is nearly impossible because:
1) The reasons are diverse, the variables infinite, the explanations complex. I think the public prefers short and simple which is why simplistic narratives hold sway (one extreme is the virus is the greatest threat to humanity, the other extreme is that it is 100% due to our response and vaccines - these extremes have appeal in their simplicity while the truth is almost certainly in the middle and far more nuanced). This means the simpler answers likely become the dominant ones regardless of truthfulness or veracity - at least in short term, which in our case may mean years to decades.
2) Disinterestedness is one of the most important foundations of scientific thought yet completely missing and dead today. A true scientist should have no preference in the outcome of experiment, should not care whether a mask works or doesn't, whether lockdowns hurt or help. The true scientist should be as removed from the outcome as an alien might be studying our species today a million years from now.
Everyone has bias of course, so reaching a true state of disinterested is impossible, but when politics, your career, and your reputation are intrinsically tied to your scientific output, it's nearly impossible to backtrack from your pet theories, admit error, and be open to being wrong. "The Science" has been shaped the past 100 years to create an inefficient system of output which is why we are in the replication crisis.
Especially for elected and appointed officials, saying you were wrong is a death wish for your career. No matter how obvious the error, you have to continually double down, make excuses, create unfalsifiable explanations. Here in the United States we saw this the War in Vietnam, the War on Drugs, The War on Terror, and now the War on Viruses.
This is what we are up against. The days of a William Farr realizing he was wrong and discarding his pet theory for John Snows seem to be over.
The greater the attention, the less inclined I think public health experts will be to admit error. Perhaps if William Farr had a 2 million following on Twitter back in the 1860's he would have been reluctant to admit Miasma was wrong. I can't see these people admitting they screwed up and are responsible for the 120,000 excess accidental deaths we had in the US the last 2 years. I can't see them acknowledging that lockdowns in New York City immediately caused 4,500 more heart attacks in a 9 week period than expected in spring of 2020.
I lean to where it seems you have arrived - the more disruption which occurred to healthcare and our normal social patterns, the greater the losses - these disruptions had complicated impacts which vary state to state, country to country, culture to culture. I'm fascinated to continue to study it, disinterestedly as possible.
[1] https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/a-new-world-health-organization-report/comment/6761196?s=r
Hello to Ohio! I hope everything is going well there. I will try my best, to briefly summarize all information which I gather over last two years.
Czech Republic and Germany are very similar. Historically we share the same genotype, weather, food, beer, history and culture. We are pretty similar to Germans, and there are many people living in Germany or commuting there for work. Due to this similarity, I would expect the virus to have the same effect on both countries. That did not happen.
We can speculate on reasons why, but the main point is, that if the virus is the cause of death, then it should affect both countries the same. With no exception. There should be no borders for biological virus, and it should spread organically. Another interesting fact is, that Germany is claiming more than 130,000 deaths on this virus, even though that all-caused mortality has not increased this much at all. This fact is leading me to conclusion, that the true cause of excessive deaths is due to the restrictions and consequently the collapse of healthcare. It's not the virus, but the interventions which caused the deaths of the people. See here - causes of deaths for 2020: https://ibb.co/XWgqJDb
The origin of the virus is also interesting. The same person who is chief of the USA pandemic response, Dr. Fauci is the same who financed the research for coronaviruses in Wuhan via EcoHealthAlliance. I don't think it's just a coincidence. As well as the so called PCR test and all coordinated restrictions which happened around the world.
Especially, in the Czech Republic, our scientists pointed out that the sequence of the virus seems to be modified by artificial intervention very soon. They also offered different type of test than PCR for lower price to identify this virus. It has been rejected by government officials and mocked as an unscientific approach. Those scientists have also been persecuted in media and heavily censored. There was no effort to really treat the people, the orders were to create many cases as possible.
About the pandemic response, I have by my self watched online the Event 201 held in New York in autumn 2019, where they exercised pandemic of so-called "CARS". This pandemic of coronavirus should originate in Latin America from pigs and spread rapidly. About 6 months after this, they made this exercise reality. That's also not coincidence.
What they are discussion on Event 201 is very disturbing. The official page is here: https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/ and this video is great for explanation of the event - it's in German with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv9J0fKlhA0
As can be seen from above, there are many things which seems to be staged. In my opinion, someone planned to impose the lockdown, and they just need some justification for that, which was in this case the virus, which they probably made by themselves and spread around on purpose to create chaos and panic. I would be happy to think otherwise, but all facts point to this and if someone doesn't have any other explanation, it seems more and more possible.
Lengthy reply incoming, but probably won't finish it until tonight/tomorrow. In the meantime I will offer some feedback on this point you made:
Explorer: "We can speculate on reasons why, but the main point is, that if the virus is the cause of death, then it should affect both countries the same. With no exception. There should be no borders for biological virus, and it should spread organically"
Theoretically yes. In practice it would depend nearly entirely on the elderly and their general health and living conditions. Germany and CR could be 99% similar but if it happened that in the CR the average 80 year old was more obese and hypertensive than the average German, that single difference could mean the difference of 1,000 and 10,000 deaths.
If, for example, the elderly in the CR tend to live in cramped nursing homes with poorer care than their German counterparts, that could explain a massive difference of outcome.
Here, in the US, there are massive gaps in outcome between various states, cities, and demographics.
Our media likes to portray the fact that minorities are dying at much higher rates due to systemic racism, lack of access to healthcare, but it ignores two unfortunate differences that aren't directly tied to anything other than wealth.
1) The poor tend to live in cramped nursing homes with much worse nurses and staff.
2) The poor (and this is something that is taboo to talk about) tend to have families that keep elderly relatives who should probably have died alive as long as possible so they can draw off their welfare checks. This is something I only realized because my wife used to work at a hospital serving underprivileged communities and would be dismayed how many life extending surgeries she would be requested to perform on people who are completely out of it, their mind gone, just living life in a wheelchair staring out a window. But that empty life was still drawing a welfare check which so their family kept asking my wife to keep them alive.
I don't know anything about the social structure for Germany and the CR, but if there are any differences like this it may shed light on what is going on.
I fully agree with you - the difference is in money and support in healthcare. Germany has always paid better for doctors and nurses, and due to that it was able to handle the overwhelming of hospitals well. Here due to the chaos which they made, the doctors and nurses were scared and also overwhelmed, so they didn't have enough capacity to handle that. That's only reason, why there was excess-mortality. The hospitals were overwhelmed and didn't have enough personal for normal working capacity due to the restrictions.
The restrictions and the lockdown caused the excess-deaths. Without that there would be normal flue season and the hospitals would handle that. It was only the politicians, corruption and media who made this excess mortality.
Lengthier reply delayed - still trying to dig through this German data...
I can not express my ideas so well, but this article does that for me. I fully agree with all what is written there, and it just summarizes the whole 2,5 year experience which we all had.
https://staceyrudin.substack.com/p/i-cant-believe-its-come-to-this?s=r
I agree with everything she said. I am surprised though that shes leaving New Jersey now, as I expect the hysteria is in it's final throes. I'm two state over from her and it's relegated to just a few masked people here and there that look like weirdos. Geographically and culturally, it's a pretty giant move to move from New Jersey to Texas - so this is a pretty big deal.
It's done and I think most politicians are trying to distance themselves from Covid policies as elections are coming up. I bet NJ returns to normal pretty soon. Question is, will they try this shit again?
I doubt it. I think it has become so obviously bad that everyone will try to pretend then never supported the measures but defend certain ones as having been "appropriate" at that time. Kinda like how the War on Terror was marketed by the media and then they pretended they were always against it.
The longer reply I was working on but got distracted was more focused on discussing how much of this was planned vs a mass hysteria event.
Do you read Chris Bray on substack? He's excellent - I bet you would like him.
This piece "Why Eve REALLY Ate That Apple" sketches out broadly some of the reasons I lean towards mass hysteria rather than planned. https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/why-eve-really-ate-that-apple?s=r
What's your take on how he frames this?