“Any decision to allow Covid to “let rip” is going to result in millions of hospitalisations and many tens of thousands of deaths.” This didn’t happen in Sweden. In fact, Sweden’s all cause excess mortality has proved to be the lowest of all countries ranked.
Newsflash. It isn’t COVID that’s the problem. It is non-COVID excess deaths caused by the economic dislocation (and a mysterious other factor that PHE aren’t quite ready to research) that are the problem, creating a long tail of excess mortality far worse than even the most fevered COVID mortality forecasts.
The experts and media (including the pages of the Spectator) predicted armageddon when COVID regulations were relaxed in the UK. Armageddon never materialised and those those doom laden forecasts have all been quietly forgotten.
The biggest fear for China relaxing its COVID regulations is relaxing regulations per se. For a certain kind of commentator and expert and government wallah in China and the UK, the regulations took on an almost religious belief status. Letting go of belief is hard.
Sweden is a far, far less densely populated country than China with few Swedish cities even approaching “small” towns in China. Population density and temperature are shown to have an affect on spread; Sweden is probably just lucky to be Sweden.
“(and a mysterious other factor that PHE* aren’t quite ready to research) that are the problem, creating a long tail of excess mortality far worse than even the most fevered COVID mortality forecasts”:
NOT the dreaded Vaccine surely?
“In fact, Sweden’s all cause excess mortality has proved to be the lowest of all countries ranked.”
Errr No.
S Korea comes top of the pops (2 year age adjusted excess mortality -30286) followed by Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Finland and then Sweden. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122010817#sec4 for a proper grown up discussion about mortality stats from different countries.
As for China they have potentially a big problem if they allow any version of Covid to freely transmit within their population.
With Covid the largest factor by orders of magnitude in terms of mortality and morbidity is age.
12% of the total population in China (2010 census) is > 65 years of age. This doesn’t sound much to Brits but remember they have a HUGE population (1,452,447,451 according to Worldometer this year) 166.37 million > 65 years of age in 2010.
According to Statista they have 35,394 hospitals. This equates to 4 million population per hospital (compared with the UK figure of aprox. 53,500 per hospital).
I suppose one could argue that historically in China, losing a few million of your population here and there has been irrelevant when it comes to the Grand Plan but clearly, someone in the CCP has done some sums.
They have an ageing population. They need to keep their wrinklies and crinklies economically active for as long as possible to prop up their economy.
No rocket science here.
“With age-adjustment, however, in our calculations several other countries such as Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and South Korea also showed no excess deaths.” (Quote from your source.)
Some years ago the London Stock Exchange used to boast “ My word is my bond”. Those days are long gone!
Now we have “ Trust me, I ‘m a Doctor”.
No longer sunshine, the medical ‘profession’ is at its nadir, particularly when it seeks to exculpate itself from the fiasco of COVID.
That’s an odd position to take in being sceptical about qualified experts (with which I don’t actually disagree) after you previously referenced the validity of your own expertise based on reading 2000 odd books.
The mention of 2,000 books was a reference to you, or at least someone calling himself Ian Stewart on another website.
I forget precisely which but NOT Twitter or Twatter or whatever it is called. As I recall ‘you’ were boasting about ‘your’ immense knowledge of WWII, and the fact that ‘you’ had read 2,000 books on the subject.
So much for “self praise is no recommendation”
eh?
I wish I had read 2000 plus books, but no I haven’t. I don’t believe I have ‘immense knowledge’ about anything – in fact much of my career was spent querying and challenging expert people about their hubris in this regard.
You simply cannot compare Sweden with China. There are too many differences even if population densities are much the same. Epidemics are non-linear phenomena. You can’t just take the population ratio and multiply them out to get the equivalent infection numbers (which Freddy tried to do a while back). The very fact that the population of Beijing is 20 times the population of Stockholm makes a difference even if the densities are the same. I see it like an atomic bomb. Keep increasing the mass (not the density) and eventually you reach critical mass and you get an explosion.
I rarely put my tin hat on….in fact never before this topic. What if CHina’s “Zero Covid” initiatives are really aimed at preparing their citizens for true biological warfare……..i.e. getting them used to this biological ‘bomb shelter’ life now before they unleash the REAL weapon in their labs. What’s the old saying? “Generals are always fight the last battles”……..think the Maginot Line while Germany was thinking Blitzkrieg. Not a zero probability
Andrew Horsman
1 year ago
Don’t trust any policy with “zero” or “one” in it. Zero Covid, Net-Zero, Zero tolerance; One Health, One World, One Belt, One World. They’re devised by people thinking like computers, unable to see beyond the false binary created by digitisation and disconnected from the real, and therefore analogue, world. And Coke Zero tastes rubbish.
Those seeking to implement such strategies in the West are binary, it would appear, in everything but gender. Or perhaps, that’s the stage on which they “doth protest too much”.
Actually, you know, I don’t. I don’t like statism and I really don’t like tyranny, but trying to achieve literally zero of both them would come at huge cost and it wouldn’t be achievable, human nature being what it is. I am in favour of policy which leans hard against both but doesn’t attempt to wipe them off the face of the earth.
Norman Powers
1 year ago
Letting omicron rip is what we’re all doing and it doesn’t matter, so I don’t think China is unprepared. There’s nothing to prepare for.
Katy Hibbert
1 year ago
Control is at the root of the Covid hysteria all over the world, China being just an extreme example. Lockdown-lovers and mask-zealots were invariably Remoaners and leftbots who hate democracy and individual freedom.
Spot on. Look at Hong Kong before and after convid19.
j watson
1 year ago
Problematic story for those who get so angry about how many western countries handled the pandemic i.e: ‘look what happens when you don’t take action of the type we did’.
Doesn’t mean we got everything right of course, but could have been much worse by looks of it.
The zero Covid strategy just a ruse to exert greater surveillance control? Not sure the Communist Party needs a ‘cover story’. Seems more likely real fear that if Covid did let rip they would be overwhelmed with much greater social unrest. Whether they should worry maybe a debate we can have, but fairly clear they are worried and not yet prepared to take the risk
Separate issue – the excess deaths in western countries, esp UK, that may result from the Lock Downs etc – hopefully the Public Enquiries will get some proper statistical discipline into this and then some serious scientific analysis of the cause and what we can do better to avoid in the future. Going into a Lock down with a health service already creaking and at max capacity, a Lock Down with many schools with rubbish infrastructure etc, probably wasn’t the best.
Off course the Chinese were TERRIFIED, they had made the damn thing after all and knew what it was potentially capable of.! (fortunately they seem to have, all too predictably, bungled the science.)
As for us ( UK) thanks to that autistic t**t Dom Cummings, we went onto a completely unnecessary lockdown, and jettisoned our national pandemic plan of Herd Immunity!
Result? Average of a UK Covid death 82. UK life expectancy 81!
Brilliant!
,
We could be forgiven for the first few weeks of covid caution – but carrying on the lying, tyrannical, hysterical, money redistributing, business destroying, freedom ending – covid bandwagon for nearly two years after it became clear nonsense was unforgivable.
Patrick Nelson
1 year ago
Why would China ever let go of zero covid when it gives them the perfect excuse to detain anyone or any community which the digital ID analysis algorithms identify as a likely nexus point of resistance to the tyranny of the CCP?
Last edited 1 year ago by Patrick Nelson
Patrick Nelson
1 year ago
Why would China ever let go of zero covid when it gives them the perfect excuse to detain anyone or any community which the digital ID analysis algorithms identify as a likely nexus point of resistance to the tyranny of the CCP?
Last edited 1 year ago by Patrick Nelson
Mel Shaw
1 year ago
I may be reading too much into this, but it is interesting that vaccination rates for older people are relatively low and relatively high for the young. Almost as if the soon to be unproductive and a burden were less valued.
“Any decision to allow Covid to “let rip” is going to result in millions of hospitalisations and many tens of thousands of deaths.” This didn’t happen in Sweden. In fact, Sweden’s all cause excess mortality has proved to be the lowest of all countries ranked.
Newsflash. It isn’t COVID that’s the problem. It is non-COVID excess deaths caused by the economic dislocation (and a mysterious other factor that PHE aren’t quite ready to research) that are the problem, creating a long tail of excess mortality far worse than even the most fevered COVID mortality forecasts.
The experts and media (including the pages of the Spectator) predicted armageddon when COVID regulations were relaxed in the UK. Armageddon never materialised and those those doom laden forecasts have all been quietly forgotten.
The biggest fear for China relaxing its COVID regulations is relaxing regulations per se. For a certain kind of commentator and expert and government wallah in China and the UK, the regulations took on an almost religious belief status. Letting go of belief is hard.
Sweden is a far, far less densely populated country than China with few Swedish cities even approaching “small” towns in China. Population density and temperature are shown to have an affect on spread; Sweden is probably just lucky to be Sweden.
Yet population densities are :
Stockholm 4.1K per square km.
Beijing 4.6K per square km.
Shanghai 3.8K per square km.
PHE?
“(and a mysterious other factor that PHE* aren’t quite ready to research) that are the problem, creating a long tail of excess mortality far worse than even the most fevered COVID mortality forecasts”:
NOT the dreaded Vaccine surely?
(* Public Health England.)
“In fact, Sweden’s all cause excess mortality has proved to be the lowest of all countries ranked.”
Errr No.
S Korea comes top of the pops (2 year age adjusted excess mortality -30286) followed by Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Finland and then Sweden. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122010817#sec4 for a proper grown up discussion about mortality stats from different countries.
As for China they have potentially a big problem if they allow any version of Covid to freely transmit within their population.
With Covid the largest factor by orders of magnitude in terms of mortality and morbidity is age.
12% of the total population in China (2010 census) is > 65 years of age. This doesn’t sound much to Brits but remember they have a HUGE population (1,452,447,451 according to Worldometer this year) 166.37 million > 65 years of age in 2010.
According to Statista they have 35,394 hospitals. This equates to 4 million population per hospital (compared with the UK figure of aprox. 53,500 per hospital).
I suppose one could argue that historically in China, losing a few million of your population here and there has been irrelevant when it comes to the Grand Plan but clearly, someone in the CCP has done some sums.
They have an ageing population. They need to keep their wrinklies and crinklies economically active for as long as possible to prop up their economy.
No rocket science here.
“With age-adjustment, however, in our calculations several other countries such as Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and South Korea also showed no excess deaths.” (Quote from your source.)
Some years ago the London Stock Exchange used to boast “ My word is my bond”. Those days are long gone!
Now we have “ Trust me, I ‘m a Doctor”.
No longer sunshine, the medical ‘profession’ is at its nadir, particularly when it seeks to exculpate itself from the fiasco of COVID.
That’s an odd position to take in being sceptical about qualified experts (with which I don’t actually disagree) after you previously referenced the validity of your own expertise based on reading 2000 odd books.
The mention of 2,000 books was a reference to you, or at least someone calling himself Ian Stewart on another website.
I forget precisely which but NOT Twitter or Twatter or whatever it is called. As I recall ‘you’ were boasting about ‘your’ immense knowledge of WWII, and the fact that ‘you’ had read 2,000 books on the subject.
So much for “self praise is no recommendation”
eh?
I wish I had read 2000 plus books, but no I haven’t. I don’t believe I have ‘immense knowledge’ about anything – in fact much of my career was spent querying and challenging expert people about their hubris in this regard.
Thanks for that insight Elaine, and the link, which provides a better explanation than the other commenters.
You simply cannot compare Sweden with China. There are too many differences even if population densities are much the same. Epidemics are non-linear phenomena. You can’t just take the population ratio and multiply them out to get the equivalent infection numbers (which Freddy tried to do a while back). The very fact that the population of Beijing is 20 times the population of Stockholm makes a difference even if the densities are the same. I see it like an atomic bomb. Keep increasing the mass (not the density) and eventually you reach critical mass and you get an explosion.
I rarely put my tin hat on….in fact never before this topic. What if CHina’s “Zero Covid” initiatives are really aimed at preparing their citizens for true biological warfare……..i.e. getting them used to this biological ‘bomb shelter’ life now before they unleash the REAL weapon in their labs. What’s the old saying? “Generals are always fight the last battles”……..think the Maginot Line while Germany was thinking Blitzkrieg. Not a zero probability
Don’t trust any policy with “zero” or “one” in it. Zero Covid, Net-Zero, Zero tolerance; One Health, One World, One Belt, One World. They’re devised by people thinking like computers, unable to see beyond the false binary created by digitisation and disconnected from the real, and therefore analogue, world. And Coke Zero tastes rubbish.
Those seeking to implement such strategies in the West are binary, it would appear, in everything but gender. Or perhaps, that’s the stage on which they “doth protest too much”.
I support a zero-tyranny and zero-statism policy.
Actually, you know, I don’t. I don’t like statism and I really don’t like tyranny, but trying to achieve literally zero of both them would come at huge cost and it wouldn’t be achievable, human nature being what it is. I am in favour of policy which leans hard against both but doesn’t attempt to wipe them off the face of the earth.
Letting omicron rip is what we’re all doing and it doesn’t matter, so I don’t think China is unprepared. There’s nothing to prepare for.
Control is at the root of the Covid hysteria all over the world, China being just an extreme example. Lockdown-lovers and mask-zealots were invariably Remoaners and leftbots who hate democracy and individual freedom.
Spot on. Look at Hong Kong before and after convid19.
Problematic story for those who get so angry about how many western countries handled the pandemic i.e: ‘look what happens when you don’t take action of the type we did’.
Doesn’t mean we got everything right of course, but could have been much worse by looks of it.
The zero Covid strategy just a ruse to exert greater surveillance control? Not sure the Communist Party needs a ‘cover story’. Seems more likely real fear that if Covid did let rip they would be overwhelmed with much greater social unrest. Whether they should worry maybe a debate we can have, but fairly clear they are worried and not yet prepared to take the risk
Separate issue – the excess deaths in western countries, esp UK, that may result from the Lock Downs etc – hopefully the Public Enquiries will get some proper statistical discipline into this and then some serious scientific analysis of the cause and what we can do better to avoid in the future. Going into a Lock down with a health service already creaking and at max capacity, a Lock Down with many schools with rubbish infrastructure etc, probably wasn’t the best.
Off course the Chinese were TERRIFIED, they had made the damn thing after all and knew what it was potentially capable of.! (fortunately they seem to have, all too predictably, bungled the science.)
As for us ( UK) thanks to that autistic t**t Dom Cummings, we went onto a completely unnecessary lockdown, and jettisoned our national pandemic plan of Herd Immunity!
Result? Average of a UK Covid death 82. UK life expectancy 81!
Brilliant!
,
We could be forgiven for the first few weeks of covid caution – but carrying on the lying, tyrannical, hysterical, money redistributing, business destroying, freedom ending – covid bandwagon for nearly two years after it became clear nonsense was unforgivable.
Why would China ever let go of zero covid when it gives them the perfect excuse to detain anyone or any community which the digital ID analysis algorithms identify as a likely nexus point of resistance to the tyranny of the CCP?
Why would China ever let go of zero covid when it gives them the perfect excuse to detain anyone or any community which the digital ID analysis algorithms identify as a likely nexus point of resistance to the tyranny of the CCP?
I may be reading too much into this, but it is interesting that vaccination rates for older people are relatively low and relatively high for the young. Almost as if the soon to be unproductive and a burden were less valued.