If 1,000 bald men die in Germany every day, and only 500 non-bald men, does it bother you? No, because you know that for men, hair tends to leave early, and is not causal to death.
If 200 Covid deaths are being reported for Germany every day, does it bother you? Well, it depends. Depends on what? On the way the counting is being performed.
The official weekly Covid death figures for Germany are published by the RKI. Now, if Covid was a condition like baldness, maybe inconvenient but in no way deadly, how many Covid deaths would we expect to see? That would depend on the prevalence of the condition in the population. For example, for a certain week, we might count the number of positive tests and divide by the population size (around 83 million). We might then apply this proportion to the number of deaths recorded for this week, and get a baseline.
But is this sufficient? In an infected person, Covid might be detectable for more than one week. Furthermore, many infections go undetected (but we can assume that all dead people have been tested for Covid). We can compute a second and third baseline by incorporating the number of positive tests from the previous week and from the two previous weeks.
And this is what we get, for week 10 of 2020 until week 15 of 2022:
The baseline did not play much of a role during Alpha times. Delta (autumn of 2021) was already different, and Omicron (from February 2022) completely changed the picture. Look at the third baseline divided by the number of Covid deaths (grey area): it is not unlikely that the majority of Covid deaths are coincidental (i.e., deaths “with Covid”) by now.
And the picture is similarly striking for ICU occupancy, which is always hovering around 20,000 for Germany, with average length of stay of around four days. Per week, this means around 35,000 = 20,000 * 7 / 4 admissions. Again, we compute baselines by multiplying this number with our different estimates for prevalence, and we plot these (red) against the number of admissions with Covid (blue; available only since week 30 of 2021):
During Omicron times, the third baseline almost perfectly explains ICU Covid admissions. Get out of here, baldy!
Oh, and for fun with vaccines, look at Portugal: currently, highest 7-day case rate in Europe (> 1%). Dear Prof. Dr. Alena Buyx, chairwoman of the German Ethics Committee, look at your six-months younger self: “Da ist die Sache durch” (“There, it’s over”). And then go back another three years, and think about what you’ve become.