Back in February of 2022, the accumulation of excess deaths in Hong Kong had reached 633 per million:
But then the month of March 2022 came. By the end of March, the accumulation of excess deaths had reached 1,653 per million:
That works out to a monthly excess death rate for March of 1,024 per million. For perspective, the monthly rate of those killed per million in Nazi-occupied Europe was 900 killed per million per month:
A yearly rate of 1.08% works out to 10,800 per million per year, or 900 per million per month over the course of 12 months. But critics and detractors may say that the steep death rate in Hong Kong was during COVID, as if it is possible for COVID to explain those excess deaths seen during that month of March in 2022.
But the circulating variant of COVID by that time was Omicron, and the hospital death rate for Omicron was only 43% as high:
The 6% hospital fatality for Omicron is only 43% of the 14% hospital fatality. And this measure is likely a worst-case scenario, because a lower proportion of those with Omicron were even admitted to hospital in the first place. If a worst case is that Omicron is just under half as fatal, then how many infections were needed?
The infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID can be taken from the UK Technical Briefing number 5, were there were 169 deaths within 28 days of 117,000 COVID infections. Adjusting the 169 deaths upward to account for deaths after 28 days, you get 190 deaths out of 117,000 infections — or 616 infections per death.
But for Omicron, a downward adjustment in lethality must be applied, with a factor of 0.429 (42.9% as lethal). This leads to just 81 deaths from 117,000 Omicron infections — or 1,436 Omicron infections per death. 1024 monthly deaths per million then requires (1024*1436=) 1,470,464 monthly Omicron infections per million — 147% spread.
In other words, to explain the excess death of March 2022 by Omicron, you need to get 10.8 million infections in one month, in a nation with only 7.3 million people in it (the average person is infected 1.47 times during that month). Evidence suggests that it is medically impossible for COVID to have been the cause of excess death that month.
A much more likely explanation for such high death is the uptake of the COVID shots.
Reference
[March 2022 rate of excess death in Hong Kong] — https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid?tab=chart&country=~HKG
[average yearly kill rate of NAZI Holocaust] — Table 1.2 from: https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE3.HTM
[169 total deaths from 117,000 total COVID infections] — UK Technical Briefing #5. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/959426/Variant_of_Concern_VOC_202012_01_Technical_Briefing_5.pdf
[hospital death rate for Omicron vs. early variants] — Hedberg P, Parczewski M, Serwin K, Marchetti G, Bai F, Ole Jensen BE, Pereira JPV, Drobniewski F, Reschreiter H, Naumovas D, Ceccherini-Silberstein F, Rubio Quintanares GH, Mwau M, Toscano C, König F, Pfeifer N, Zazzi M, Fanti I, Incardona F, Cozzi-Lepri A, Sönnerborg A, Nauclér P. In-hospital mortality during the wild-type, alpha, delta, and omicron SARS-CoV-2 waves: a multinational cohort study in the EuCARE project. Lancet Reg Health Eur. 2024 Feb 2;38:100855. doi: 10.1016/j.lanepe.2024.100855. PMID: 38476753; PMCID: PMC10928271. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10928271/
[By Day 28 after symptom onset, 89% of all of the people who are going to die will have already died (using the 95% upper bound on the mean and SD of the lognormal distribution given] — Linton NM, Kobayashi T, Yang Y, et al. Incubation Period and Other Epidemiological Characteristics of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Infections with Right Truncation: A Statistical Analysis of Publicly Available Case Data. Journal of Clinical Medicine. 2020 Feb;9(2). DOI: 10.3390/jcm9020538. PMID: 32079150; PMCID: PMC7074197. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7074197/
Excellent. Thanks again.