Covid Infections Surge in Europe
A late autumn surge in reported Covid infections is underway in Europe, with spikes in Austria, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and Norway, and the possible beginnings of one in France, Portugal and Italy. This is despite high vaccine coverage and the heavy use of vaccine passports in most of these countries including Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France.
Some of this is at least partly a result of ramping up testing, especially in Austria and Denmark.
Denmark’s positive test rate is currently flat (see below). This is despite the country declaring the pandemic over and abandoning vaccine passports in September. However, due to the climbing reported infection rate, the country’s Parliament is now said to be preparing to return to a state of emergency and reactivate the vaccine pass scheme, despite the rise being so far largely an artefact of increased testing.
Elsewhere, however, the positive rate is also rising, suggesting real Covid and not just a testing artefact.
Most of these places already had a summer Delta surge of varying sizes, and there is no new variant being reported, so this appears to be primarily seasonal, and is still all Delta.
Will it dip again before winter, like it did in many countries last year, and has already in the U.K? December is usually the peak month for winter flu-like illness, so we will be following it closely.
In the U.K., it’s worth noting that in the five-year (2015-19) average of deaths there is a mini-bump in October that declines slightly at the start of November, just as there is this year and there was last year (see circled areas of graph below).
However, in the five-year average, deaths then rise again in mid-November, before spiking at the turn of the year, and Covid deaths followed a similar pattern last year. Will it repeat the pattern this year? If it does we should expect infections and then deaths to begin rising soon, gently at first and then surging in December. It’s hard to see why this year should be different, save for the immunity we have built up over the past two years. How much difference will that make? Will the vaccinated continue to experience suppressed death rates compared to the unvaccinated, or will time and winter change that?
Whatever turns out to be the case, the NHS has no excuse not to be ready this year, so there can be no justification for renewed restrictions.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Colds, sniffles, flu and bat-flu on the increase in November.
In other news, a bear was seen marching purposefully towards the woods with a roll of Andrex’s best clamped under one arm, and politicians have been found with their hands in the till again.
‘suggesting real Covid and not just a testing artefact.’
Really? How can you tell the difference?
‘Learn to live with it…’. Are we there yet? Or is this like ‘climate’: another Pelagian mirage?
It’s not even winter yet.
Three jabs and still cases rise.
Still no mention of flu. It’s almost as if the Fauci lab made bug is flu.
Anyone would think this could be seasonal.
Best to lock the world down again, just in case…
Anyone would think that we, perhaps including you PatrickF, were predicting this very thing last midsummer and that bozo would use it as an excuse to reimpose lockdown, which he did, sneakily disguised as Tiers as though we wouldn’t notice.
Cleverley getting folks arguing about who and where should be in this Tier or that one rather than resisting the whole concept as nonsense.
“Won’t somebody please think of the children’s!”
child from behind the mask, “we learned in science about seasonality. We also aren’t going to die from an avalanche in July. Do you need a pillow and nap time?”
The lockdown season?
“Think about Mr. Badger going into hibernation, it’s just like that my little darling. because we all know how clever Mr Badger is don’t we?”.
Badgers don’t hibernate 😉
That’s a townie for you.
Discussion of covid infections, tests, and deaths need to be seen alongside other illnesses and causes of death. Without the comparison we cannot assess relative risk and therefore the threat from covid is exaggerated.
unquantifiable, rather.
No no no no, we don’t want more testing of everything else, less is more in this “CASE”.
Actually I’d love testing for Alzheimers to resume properly. 40,000 cases less were diagnosed in 2020.
With early treatment the disease can be significantly slowed giving the patient (and their family) a better life for more of their remaining years. Since covid, like so many other serious illnesses, it’s been shoved to the back of the queue.
Is there a big pharma cure for Alzheimers?
Austria catches what was the British disease of ramping up testing (2nd down graph)to find more cases (top graph) while the proportion of ‘cases’ from tests (3rd down graph) remains stubbornly below the average of other European countries* so all that effort has proved absolutely nothing.
Except that headlines screaming about ‘Autumn Covid surge in Austria’ are misleading at best.
Poland? Perhaps they are targeting people who are already showing signs of Covid since there would be no obvious natural reason why they should differ so much from their neighbours.
*Interpretation of graphs thanks to1973-74 ‘0’ Level Economics teacher Mr. Blenkinsop (honest!).
Perhaps Poland is being invaded by trafficked people carrying illness with them?
From that hotbed of Covid hysteria to the east, Belarus?
A bit like the Turk catapulting plague rotted corpses into the besieged Genoese castles of the Crimea, which is how that pestilence arrived in Europe.
The disease needs to circulate in the population so that natural immunity can be developed.
All the artificial means have been tried and tested and failed: lockdowns, masks, social distancing, experimental jabs and now vax passports. It’s all pointless.
I predict that those countries that have had prior high death rates will see lower “spikes” because the disease has gotten around more and those that thought they had done well will have more problems.
Well it isn’t my prediction. It’s Anders Tegnell’s from last year who warned that we should wait a couple of years to judge.
Sadly it will take several years more for most countries to admit the futility of their actions.
“The disease needs to circulate in the population so that natural immunity can be developed”.
Which is just what bozo spent last year from March-April onwards deliberately preventing us from doing in every way he could.
Sadly for the twat he not could prevent thousands from descending upon the seaside in the Summer or students from ‘mingling’ in ways that only students can at the beginning of Autumn term 2020 thus safely Post-Covid and safe for Gran and Grandad to share the permitted 24 hour Xmas gathering.
Puzzle at the time was
‘why would he do that?’
CCP Social Credit?
What’s that then? Some sort of conspiracy theory is it?
Now we know.
Do stop talking sense – you’ll confuse and upset them.
I totally agree with your last paragraph. The various administrations are so dug in to their narrative, it’s going to take a while for them to admit any problems may have been self inflicted.
to me, that’s part of the state of public discussion. If anyone makes an error, they are called on to resign. So they double down on mistakes or try to obscure them. I’d much prefer a situation where people can be open about errors so they can be addressed then learned from. This isn’t just for covid responses, but politics in general
Yes its obviously ridiculous we demand accountability, they should just be shot at dawn in front of a firing squad the way army deserters were. We are now living in a day & age, where people in public office act with impunity & literally get away with murder, like those officers ordering deserters deaths in the first world war!
Please don’t ask me to be sympathetic towards politicians, they wouldn’t know integrity if it suffocated them like a “face covering”! You seem to be one of those people still in the denial group.
I feel no sympathy for the current bunch of politicians. I hope they get voted out and replaced by a more honourable set (possible example – the PM of Norway mentioned in the reply below) The current bunch are a pack of self obsessed toads only interested in preserving their own power
The Prime Minister of Norway admitted that his lockdown policies were wrong and publicly apologised to his Nation as he scrapped most of them.
It gained him victory in the next general election, not that bozo was man enough to follow suit.
Countries (governments) will NEVER admit the futility of their actions. It will always be written that lockdown policies and all that goes with them was the right and only way to combat Covid19. Sweden and Florida have already been more or less airbrushed out of the picture.
Meanwhile, in Sweden….
Ah, the life that matters in the woodpile!
Lol!
New research out of Texas offers a grim illustration of the risks of not getting vaccinated. The state health department found that unvaccinated people accounted for more than 85 percent of the Lone Star State’s 29,000 covid-linked fatalities between mid-January and October. Seven percent of the deaths were among partially vaccinated people, while about 8 percent were fully vaccinated. Put another way: the unvaccinated in Texas were many more times more likely to die of the disease than those fully vaccinated.
Look at the period studied and look at when the deaths occurred. Then look at the trend of uptake of the gene therapy over the same period.
That study related to September, which was the absolute peak of the outbreak. It has now dropped to 25%, at the same time that vaccine effectiveness is dropping. You must keep up.
The study cited actually relates to the whole of 2021; a year in which most deaths occurred prior to roll out of the gene therapy making the percentages meaningless.
I stand corrected. I was relying on information supplied by someone I was discussing it with. Your point highlights the danger of comparing the US experience with that of the UK. The two differ over timing of infection peaks, proportions of particular vaccines used and timings of vaccinations.
I also agree that the use of percentages in some cases or absolute quantities in other is chosen to present the worst or best possible case depending on the point being made.
I’m with you there. I work in marketing and a big proportion of my time is spent reporting results. I try to be honest and straightforward. But some of my peers regularly present the best sounding stats relating to the same data. When they present data using percentages, it’s very often because the hard numbers are unimpressive. If a company making 1 sale per week is now making 2 sales per week after a marketing campaign, they’ll always refer to a 100% increase in sales and neglect to mention the original figure where possible. Standard bs.
My background is similar but from 2 decades and more ago, as are my experiences.
Perhaps more importantly still, the study covers the entire calendar year of 2021 – a year in which the peak of fatalities occurred prior to mass uptake of the gene therapy. Given that the spike in infections from sars-cov-2 was at the beginning of the year in winter, it’s inevitable that the majority of deaths would have occurred then and the vast majority of the population would have yet to have taken up the offer of the gene therapy…even if they Gad intended to get around to it. Similar dubious reports have also been circulating in the UK. A little critical though required here, I’m afraid.
77th crew?
ILLEGAL immigrants who didn’t get their ivermectin before crossing the border?
erm… were many Texans vaccinated in the first 6 months of this year, and were people who coincidentally died within a 2 weeks of their 2nd (or between 1st and 2nd jabs) counted as ‘unvaccinated’. ”The state health department found…” – They probably found that 100% of those who died (for what ever reason) within 28 days of a positive test in 2020 was unvaccinated – but that is equally useless information. What can’t be denied is that 100% of those who died after their first vaccination and beyond were vaccinated – in the real world.
what might be more interesting is how the percentage of ‘covid related fatalities’ in the july to october ‘delta’ wave, compares to the unvaccinated during this period
Hahaha…maybe the vaccines work ‘betterer’ in other States….?..
Texas is around 20th in relation to all the States in deaths per 100,000. But of course it’s a Red State and therefore the avowed enemy of The Washington Post which prides itself on being the home of Sleepy Joe, more masking, more lockdowns and more mandates!
Maybe they should look at the death rates in some Blue States, like New Jersey, or Arizona, New York, or Massachusetts? All have much higher death rates per 100,000 population than Texas, and all have higher vaccination rates…go figure??
All have much higher death rates per 100,000 population than Texas
Death Rates per 100K and % fully vaccinated
Texas: 0.3 62%
New Jersey: 0.2 67%
NY: 0.18 67%
Arizona: 0.49 54%
Massachusetts: 0.19 70%
i.e only AZ has a higher death rate than Texas and its vaxx rate is lower.
according to worldometers Texas has a lower death/million rate than those other states, what am I missing?
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
I think that is the total deaths since the epidemic began. I am quoting the current rate per day. Clearly the latter is the relevant figure if you are evaluating vaccination.
Ah, OK thanks – could it be possible that states that were hit harder earlier in the pandemic have better natural immunity levels than Texas or is it easier to automatically give credit to the vaccines
I suggest that it is best avoid an over simple explanation of relative deaths rates. States differ in so many ways – climate, urbanisation, demographics, when the virus first hit them etc I only wanted to point out that ebygum‘s comment was misleading.
Nothing….I have no intention of talking to the nutter, he just finds statistics that he somehow bends to make it work for him. As my mum would have said, ‘he could fall out with himself in an empty room’!
Being bored to death by the likes of you, perhaps?
For such number to mean anything, you really want % of unvaccinated affected and not % of affected unvaccinated. Better luck with the next attempt to fake it until you make it.
Original antigenic sin?
Correlation is not causation, but it is hard not to see some sort of connection between testing and the number of positives it obtains.
SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus, coronaviruses start to slowly increase September, peaking late autumn/ early winter and then tailing off. This same pattern will probably reoccur in 2022; possibly 2023 and even 2024, however, I suspect that it will magically disappear just before the general election in 2024 and Boris Johnson will claim the credit for the way his government handled the pandemic.
Doubt it will be Boris Bunter, I’ll be very surprised if he lasts into Spring 2022.
Wallpaper adhesive…
I’ve given you an optimistic uptick.
You would have thought this might trigger some critical analysis in the media of why this is happening in countries with vax passports and mask mandates.
What we get is “100000 deaths predicted as delta surges”. To which the sheeple go isn’t that terrible I must demand we have restrictions and masks without thinking for one second about how and why.
As long as the narrative is continuing then it’s job done.
As JHB says it’s not over until we say it’s over.
Yep, instead, we have Denmark reintroducing the stuff that didn’t make a difference in those countries who kept them in place or went even further with them.
I said at the time of the announcement of Denmark’s lifting of the restrictions that this was likely delayed and timed so that the ensuing inevitable seasonal rise could then be blamed on the ‘freedoms’ and restrictions be introduced, also leading to strengthening that particular correlation equals causation narrative in general and thereby eliminating the need to reintroduce freedoms ever again.
My reasoning then and conviction then and now was and is also that this is all WEF&co stage managed, country by country. Some get a bit more leeway earlier, some later. Nothing happens by chance in those regards.
The big key now is to make effective treatments available as soon as someone feels ill. A simple course of steroids alone will keep hospital numbers suppressed.
As I think of Denmark (and here as shone again in recent coverage), the media really do get to create reality for a national by bringing fear to the people complete with a solution. The rise there being due to testing and yet it’s pressure from media not scientific fact driving calls for the return of useless passports. It reminds me of coverage of the American war in Vietnam. The Tet Offensive was viewed by the Communist North as a total disaster and utter failure. But the way it was covered in America led people to think it was worse than The Somme. Media created the sense of loss, and it became reality.
at this point, we must combat such false reporting and clear bias daily so NHS heads spouting lies don’t get near the minds of our fellow citizens.
https://thewhiterose.uk/south-african-physician-dr-shankara-chetty-talks-about-the-bigger-plan/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-latest-news-from-our-blog_11 This is the inventor of the highly effective 8th day protocol. Steroid, antihistamine, cortisol, zinc etc.. If this was about health, such protocols would not be made unavailable but available. He has now also come around to Mike Yeadon’s view, namely that this is a deliberate genocide, through the vaccines. He also explains well why this will be hard to prove, the illnesses will occur over a long time frame, be very individual and as such not directly traceable back to the vaccines. (Personally, I am more in the deliberate reduction of life expectancy camp, rather than in the deliberate genocide one, but it still rhymes and fits.) We are already seeing that, of course. The way to establish this will be annual excess (cardio, cancer etc.) cases and deaths over time compared to the say the 2010-2019 annual average and, ideally, comparing them by vaxxed/unvaxxed control groups. In other words and also applied to the current situation, if we have 2x the amount of heart attacks currently, the chance that your friend’s or a footballer’s death from one was really due to the vaccine is 50%. In sum, half the heart attacks will then definetely have been due… Read more »
Now we are going to find out whether it was the vaccines or the high levels of vitamin D that ameliorated symptoms in the UK, over the summer. That said, it looks as though endemic equilibrium has been established (eventually and just in time) in the vaccinated cohort in the UK; endemic equilibrium was established in the selfless, control group, who have chosen not to be vaccinated, back in June/ July. Tegnell and Geisecke will be, quietly, smiling to themselves anyway.
The other side of the coin is that relatively low levels of vitamin D from Autumn to Spring have been problematic for years. After all, the usual suspects have quietly revised their guidelines on this subject, and evidently the supermarkets have spotted the market, with the products on sale off the shelf – e.g. the M one has one with 25 µg per day, which is 5 times more than the older “everyday health” product.
Do we think that the Austria curve in the top graph might soon be the first to take off at warp speed into outer space and then plummet back to earth again? – would make an interesting graphic curve…
“Infections”? “Confirmed cases”?
You cannot have a meaningful conversation with someone talking complete gibberish.
Sweden?
I blame the unvaccinated. I think they should be rounded up and executed for being so selfish to the rest of humanity. Get rid of the unvaccinated and watch the cases fall? (I am of course being sarcastic).
The proportion of cases testing positive is sort of interesting but still lacks context. For each country are they testing for screening? Clinically diagnosis of symptomatic cases only? What criteria before allowing tests? LFT included?
without knowing that, it’s still hard to compare them.
the countries doing the least tests per 1000 have the greatest percentage of positives from tests done. Does that not suggest that the countries doing the least tests are mainly testing symptomatic people and the countries doing mass testing are mainly testing the healthy.
It does, and it also indicates that comparing one with another is meaningless statistically.
What are these jabs doing? Why do Govts continue to insist they are beyond necessary? Why is dragging out the ‘pandemic’ and maintaining wholly unnecessary emergency powers, so important?
Money, money, money. Not for our benefit, a cynic might observe.
Poland seems to be using the testing regime sensibly. Low and decreasing infections however extremely high (comparatively) positve test outcomes.
So perhaps fewer tests used to confirm a diagnosis based intially on symptoms is the sensible way to go, just like the test manufacturers recommend.
Maybe we should only test people who are actually ill?
Or not bother testing people at all…. no point in trying to stop the spread now, the virus is everywhere.
Just a thought.
What’s the point to test people who are already ill?
I remember way way back at the beginning of all this nonsense when the UK government had, to date, not fallen victim to the panic but all of the bedwetters were pointing at other countries and saying how much better they were doing, and I said on the pages of The Guardian that we would need to wait two years until the virus had done two full winter seasons everywhere before we could pass judgement on who had done “well” and “badly”.
And I also said that almost certainly the outcome would be very similar in most countries regardless of what measures governments took.
And here we are.
The idea that there are some problems for which “more Government” and “more globalism” isn’t a solution is a difficult one for people to accept but it is the truth.
The few countries which have done well in the world are those which have not adopted draconian measures, kept their populations calm, and have a relatively decentralised healthcare model with those responsible at arms length from politics and the media.
In fact here is my comment from July 2020.
Why were there no articles by actual journalists saying this 18 months ago?
I suppose we are the “actual journalists” now.
Well done. Sorry to be a bit pedantic, but I guess that in the G “quite possibly ever” should have been “quite possibly never”, which is entirely possible. After all, it’s just over 32 years since the old “common cold unit” closed down, and so far no effective product that could be used as a ‘vaccine’ against the other coronaviruses or rhinoviruses has been produced. The trial products are only “emergency use authorisation” ones, after all.
This article looking at sub-lineage variants indicates a different picture of mutations evading vaccines causing the increases & that these differ throughout the continent.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.01.21265749v1.full
Load of innumerate bolleaux. Look at the axes, 800 per million people in top graph. So 80 per 100000 people, 8 per 10000 people. So less than 1 per 1000 people. Now think of a school with 1000 pupils. How many off sick with some sort of sniffle on any random day? I would bet a large fish supper there would be a few in each year group in winter, certainly at least 10 over the whole school, ie an order of magnitude higher than the “shocking figures” in the graph.
They’ve monetized the common cold, brilliant piece of entrepreneurial activity, but it shafts the rest of us forever.
‘Due to limited testing, the number of confirmed cases is lower than the true number of infections.’
Bollocks. Due to an unreliable assessment tool, the number of cases almost certainly exceeds the number of infections!
Its called the onset of winter! But like the spread of covid, the cretinous governments of europe (with the exception of sweden), think they can stop that too. New slogan, we are cancelling winter to save the f**king nhs!
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/denmark-re-impose-ccp-virus-restrictions-after-ditching-all-rules-2-months-ago-prime
They are spouting outright lies as facts. Purely Orwellian:
“If we are to avoid closures of schools and the rest of society, we need to get ahead of things, and it is proven that both corona-pass and face masks work against infection spread,”
“In a Sunday Facebook post, Frederiksen claimed that COVID-19 is spreading from unvaccinated people to elderly people and at-risk people who have been vaccinated, although she did not provide evidence for her assertion.”