You may have read last week that Denmark is opening up and ending all Covid restrictions “due to the success of its vaccination program.”
The only correct response to this is lol.
England, Scotland, and Israel are among the most vaccinated countries in the world, and they have seen huge spikes in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths since July.
Here’s what’s really going on. The continental European countries got started late on their mass vaccination programs. They tried to cheap out with Pfizer and Moderna, which weren’t having it. Eventually they gave in.
But as a result, their vaccination campaigns were months behind the United States in the spring, and even further behind Britain. As late as June 1, only 22 in 100 people in Denmark were fully vaccinated. As of now 74 in 100 are.
Thus these countries are now in what I call the “happy vaccine valley” - the three-to four-month period following the second dose when antibodies are high enough that the vaccines actually appear to work. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s two weeks of negative efficacy after the first shot, a month of maybe 50% efficacy, three months of near-complete protection, and then a rapid fall to what looks like 0% protection within three months. Science!)
I assume the Danes are smart enough to know exactly where they stand. They also know that since they have a healthy population, Covid-19 is at most a trivial problem for them on a societal basis.
How trivial?
Denmark has about 6 million people.
As of Sept. 9, about 2,600 of them had died of Covid since March 2020.
How many of those people were under 50?
Twenty-six. Yes, 26. Veintiseis. Just over 1 per month.
Five were under 30. Five, out of 2.1 million Danes.
Yes, you read that right.
This chart is a bit hard to read, but the key is the rightmost column - deaths (only males are visible). It’s stratified by decade, youngest to oldest. As you can see, more people over 90 have died than under 70 - this is not uncommon in countries that don’t have terrible problems with obesity, like ‘Merica.
Source: https://dc-covid.site.ined.fr/en/data/denmark/
(You have to download the Excel file.)
The Danes - whether they admit the truth or not, probably not - have rightly decided that enough is enough and they can’t twist themselves into knots forever for an illness that produces numbers like this. So they are taking advantage of the happy vaccine valley to follow their neighbors to the north (Hello Swedish model!).
Pretty soon cases will start rising again, but by then it will be too late. They’ll say they’ve done all they can and that Covid is just like the flu, endemic and manageable. And everyone will ignore the fact that it always was!
I guess this qualifies as a happy ending.
So, Denmark is smart enough to take one of the many 'off ramps' that have presented themselves over the last 18 months (one of the early ones was Summer 2020, when cases plummeted and the NYT -- the NYT! -- reported that PCR tests were giving 90% false positives).
Unfortunately, at least in my personal experience, a good part of the US has been propagandized into a state of paralyzed terror. They are well beyond the point of reason and they don't WANT to take an off ramp.
I'd hoped that the vaccine would, at least, serve as an inoculation against *fear*, but here we are with the vaccinated (i.e., purportedly protected) being terrified of the unvaccinated. When has that ever happened before, with a "vaccine"?
I'm happy the Danish government feels their citizens are sane enough to take the off-ramp. Sadly, it's Karen driving the car here -- white knuckled, teeth gritted behind her triple mask, and she ain't about to slow down.
This is in line with the US military data. There are 1.3 million active/reserve military under the age of 30 in the United States. Exactly THREE of the people in that cohort have died from (with?) COVID in 20 months.and that's with a 10% positivity rate, which is only marginally lower than non-military positivity.
So if you're under thirty, and in good enough physical shape to join the military, your odds of dying from COVID in a given year are 30X LESS than dying in a fatal automobile crash. If you are in that group and have already recovered from COVID, the odds of you dying from a subsequent infection are in line with getting struck by lightning or drowning in your bathtub.
Can't wait for the smooth brains to jump and frantically waive their hands screeching about relative risk reduction from the vaccines, when ABSOLUTE risk reduction for certain cohorts is functionally ZERO.