Rolling Two-week Excess Death per Million
4 nations compared against 2 standards of excess death
Four of the most highly-vaccinated nations are Belgium, Chile, Malta, and Portugal. Belgium has the lowest vaccine uptake level at 217 doses administered for every 100 people.
Three big phases of COVID dominated during the year of 2021, which is also the year of COVID vaccines. Alpha was dominant until the summer of 2021, Delta was dominant until the winter of 2021, and Omicron was dominant by January 2022.
Robust estimation practices yield estimates of lethality for each COVID variant, given in terms of an infection fatality rate (IFR) — i.e., your chance of dying if infected. Data on over 50,000 Alpha variant infections indicate that Alpha variant COVID was up to 80% worse than flu.
Data on hundreds of thousands of Delta variant infections indicate that Delta variant was no longer significantly worse than flu. Data on hundreds of thousands of Omicron variant infections indicate that Omicron variant is not even half as lethal as flu.
Though Omicron variant is more transmissible than flu, the IFR of Omicron is only one-third. The chance of dying from a flu infection is three times the chance of dying from an Omicron infection, because Omicron isn’t any worse than what is seen with a “bad cold.”
Even though the underlying disease is no longer even as lethal as the flu is, excess death rates have been running above even the peak, two-week pneumonia and influenza (P&I) mortality found back in January of 2018: 43.4 P&I deaths per million.
Most troubling is the fact that, after vaccines rolled out in Portugal, two-week excess death per million rose to levels (397 per million) higher than the average kill rate of the Holocaust (350 per million).
Even the lethality of the Alpha variant of COVID is insufficient to explain such a high a rate of death.
The two-week Holocaust kill rate is 16 times higher than the worst two weeks of flu, because of how organized and efficient the NAZIs were — allocating tremendous resources in order to maintain the highest possible kill rate, given existing technology.
It was the upper limit on the amount of death which could be caused when much resources were allocated just toward producing death. It is higher than the average death rate seen during World War I.
Such death rates should not be possible from a disease which is not even twice as bad as flu though (only 80% worse than flu at the beginning of 2021). Indeed, during the year of 2020, Portugal never had such a high rate of excess death.
Throughout the year of 2020, excess death rates in Portugal never reached even half as high as was found after the administration of COVID vaccines. The most logical reason for ‘Holocaust-level’ death rates in Portugal is the administration of COVID vaccines.
Reference
[Cumulative Excess Death per million] — OWID data. Available: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
[2017/18 Weekly P&I deaths] — CDC “FluView” online tool. Available: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
[Annualized 0.91% kill rate of Holocaust (Germany + Occupied Europe)] — DEMOCIDE: NAZI GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER. 20,946,000 Victims: Nazi Germany 1933 To 1945. By R.J. Rummel. Available: https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.CHAP1.HTM
[As of 19 Jan 2021, from 52,000 COVID infections with Alpha (SGTF) variant, there were 104 deaths (IFR=0.20%)] — UK Technical Briefing #5 (PDF file). Available general: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-novel-sars-cov-2-variant-variant-of-concern-20201201
Available specific page: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/959426/Variant_of_Concern_VOC_202012_01_Technical_Briefing_5.pdf
[In almost 700,000 cases confirmed by sequencing, Delta was 42% as lethal as Alpha (IFR=0.08%)] — UK Technical Briefing #25. Available general: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-sars-cov-2-variants-technical-briefings
Available specific page: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1025827/Technical_Briefing_25.pdf
[From 1.5 million confirmed cases, Omicron is (at most) 41% as lethal as Delta (IFR = 0.034%)] — Nyberg T, Ferguson NM, Nash SG, Webster HH, Flaxman S, Andrews N, Hinsley W, Bernal JL, Kall M, Bhatt S, Blomquist P, Zaidi A, Volz E, Aziz NA, Harman K, Funk S, Abbott S; COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, Hope R, Charlett A, Chand M, Ghani AC, Seaman SR, Dabrera G, De Angelis D, Presanis AM, Thelwall S. Comparative analysis of the risks of hospitalisation and death associated with SARS-CoV-2 omicron (B.1.1.529) and delta (B.1.617.2) variants in England: a cohort study. Lancet. 2022 Mar 16:S0140-6736(22)00462-7. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00462-7. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35305296; PMCID: PMC8926413. Available: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8926413/