Scotland has decided it will stop releasing Covid statistics showing the different hospitalization and death rates based on whether patients have been vaccinated or not. Public Health Scotland described the statistics as “very simple”, but said that anti-vaxxer advocates were misreading them.
Although having described the statistics as very simple, they then go on to say “there are so many caveats and they just pull certain figures out that should not be used”.
So, which is it? Very simple statistics? Or very complicated ones?
The biggest question of all has to be “What are they trying to hide?”. Seriously. I have certainly seem some data that suggests vaccinated people are no better protected than unvaccinated people, and perhaps even a bit worse off. But if that is wrong, rather than hiding the data entirely, why doesn’t Public Health Scotland instead address the misunderstandings and rebut them?
Hiding the data gives credence to suggestions the data is contradicting the vaccination narrative. Explaining the data – assuming credible explanations are available – would rebut and resolve the concerns about what it is showing.
The authoritarian “We don’t trust you to understand this simple data, and we’re not going to explain it ourselves, we’re just going to suppress it” approach seems less than ideal.
Some good news in the US. Senator Ron Johnson has introduced a Bill that would prevent Federal Agencies (and politicians) from interfering with doctors and how they choose to treat their patients. This is something that is well overdue. It is crazy to think that administrators and bureaucrats, many of whom, even if they do have MD degrees, have not practiced front-line medicine for years/decades/ever, could create “one size fits all” laws that are more appropriate than allowing doctors to do what they’ve studied long and hard to do – to simply practice medicine and treat their patients, individually, with whatever works.
If there’s one thing that is becoming starkly apparent from Covid, it is that the public health authorities do not know best. If anything, all too often, it appears they know nothing, or even worse, advocate inappropriate and wrong responses that make things worse not better.
That’s not to say some oversight and regulation isn’t required. Here’s an amazing and appalling story about a Covid testing company and the astonishing way it failed to actually do the Covid testing it claimed it was doing.
Current Numbers
The Faeroe Islands is now at almost exactly two-thirds of its entire population having officially reported a case of Covid. This speaks against the claim made by some people that for every reported case, there are ten unreported cases. But it also makes me very curious to understand how many of these cases are people who have reported more than one Covid infection.
No shifts in the major country table. Astonishingly, the US numbers seem to be almost standing still, but that is perhaps partly due to errors in my estimating and the rapidly reducing case counts.
No shifts also in the death rate table. And major reductions in new case activity levels in the table of new cases reported last week.
In Europe, not a single country reported a rise in new case rates for the last week. Sweden had a 75% drop, Ireland had a 63% drop, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands all dropped 47%, France dropped 39%, Germany dropped 8% and the UK dropped 26%. Overall, Europe had a 25% reduction in new case rates for the week.
Good news in North America too, with Canada dropping another 34%, Mexico dropping 13%, and the US dropping 49%.
Africa had a 23% drop, Asia had a small 4% drop (due to significant rises in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam), South America went down 26%, and Oceania dropped 4%, with New Zealand reporting a 270% rise in cases. Clearly, Covid is making up for lost time in NZ.
The world in total dropped 21%.
Top Case Rates Minor (population under 10 million) Countries (cases per million)
| Rank | One Week Ago | Today |
| 1 | Faeroe Islands (584,281) | Faeroe Islands (651,738) |
| 2 | Andorra (479,442) | Andorra (485,226) |
| 3 | Gibraltar (424,172) | Gibraltar (441,663) |
| 4 | Slovenia (407,703) | Slovenia (422,253) |
| 5 | San Marino | Denmark |
| 6 | Seychelles | San Marino |
| 7 | Denmark | Seychelles |
| 8 | St Barth | Georgia |
| 9 | Israel (367,371) | Israel (380,963) |
| 10 | Georgia (365,639) | St Barth (376,285) |
Top Case Rates Major (population over 10 million) Countries (cases per million)
| Rank | One Week Ago | Today |
| 1 | Netherlands (333,474) | Netherlands (353,701) |
| 2 | France (331,397) | France (340,206) |
| 3 | Czech Rep (316,192) | Czech Rep (326,405) |
| 4 | Portugal | Portugal |
| 5 | Belgium | Belgium |
| 6 | UK (267,399) | UK (271,738) |
| 7 | USA (about 244,000) | USA (about 244,000) |
| 8 | Sweden | Sweden |
| 9 | Spain | Spain |
| 10 | Greece | Greece |
| 11 | Italy | Italy |
| 12 | Argentina (190,435) | Argentina (190,435) |
Top Death Rate Major Countries (deaths per million)
| Rank | One Week Ago | Today |
| 1 | Peru (6,173) | Peru (6,206) |
| 2 | Czech Republic (3,521) | Czech Republic (3,559) |
| 3 | Romania (3,237) | Romania (3,287) |
| 4 | Brazil | Brazil |
| 5 | Poland | Poland |
| 6 | USA (2,823) | USA (2,871) |
| 7 | Argentina | Argentina |
| 8 | Colombia | Colombia |
| 9 | Belgium | Belgium |
| 10 | Italy (2,504) | Italy (2,536) |
Top Rates in New Cases Reported in the Last Week (new cases per million) for Countries over one million population
| Rank | One Week Ago | Today |
| 1 | Denmark 52,489 | Denmark 40,725 |
| 2 | Netherlands 38,411 | Latvia 36,349 |
| 3 | Latvia 36,987 | Estonia |
| 4 | Georgia | Georgia |
| 5 | Estonia | Austria |
| 6 | Norway | Slovakia |
| 7 | Slovenia | Netherlands 20,241 |
| 8 | Lithuania | Singapore |
| 9 | Israel | Norway |
| 10 | Austria | Lithuania |
| 11 | Bahrain | Bahrain |
| 12 | Slovakia 22,706 | Slovenia 14,552 |
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Items below include a careful analysis of an ivermectin study, unlike the response of a prominent Covid commentator, an interesting coincidence, and a graphical look at the falling Covid case counts.
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Please stay happy and healthy; all going well, I’ll be back again on Thursday.
Please click here for a listing of all our Covid-19 articles.
David, I have appreciated your Covid reporting from the beginning. Long after Covid is a bad memory the thought that so-called public health officials, politicians and almost the entire medical establishment were wrong — wrong on purpose– and conspired to kill hundreds of thousands in the US alone. I understand now that we have lived under an illusion of freedom for decades. I now question any “official” report produced by the government and/or the media and the media you-name-it-complex. We will see what happens.
Absolutely. It has shaken my confidence to the core – all the seemingly dispassionate and, dare I say, “scientific” (and, again, dare I say) “experts” have shown themselves to be no more reliable than the crassest of politicians.
I will never be able to reconcile, in my mind, how it is that people charged with saving our lives can be so, variously, venal and stupid. But, as unthinkable as that is, the evidence of their failings is abundantly evident, everywhere we choose to look.