To illustrate and update a previous post, I compiled the German data on Covid ICU occupancy, as they are published in the RKI’s weekly reports, into a single diagram:
All data points correspond to four-week averages, with the value on the x-axis denoting the calendar week starting the four-week period. The RKI counts a certain number of symptomatic cases (red), a proportion of which are vaccinated (yellow). The DIVI has its own figures of new admissions to ICU (black). Since the middle of December, 2021, the DIVI also tries to take note of patients’ vaccination status. Both the number of new ICU admissions (green) and the proportion of vaccinated are being reported to the RKI and mentioned in the Wochenbericht. Black and green should coincide, and they almost do. For most patients, the DIVI knows the vaccination status (green, dashed), and roughly two thirds of these are vaccinated (blue). The data points for (the four-week period starting at) week 50 seem odd but this might have been some problem with getting the process started (maybe counting more than four weeks), and shall be forgiven.
Starting with calendar weeks 35 and 43, the RKI messed something up and lost track of many patients. They might have changed the definition of “vaccinated” or something (for example, those recently vaccinated or boosted are being neglected, an evil trick that seems widespread). Over Christmas, the RKI felt unable to publish, and since then, numbers have gone far south. Strangely enough, this is not the case with the DIVI numbers. What is an explanation for this divergence? Is the RKI simply too stupid? Or is the number of symptomatic cases really that low, with most patients only testing positive accidentally? Either way, vaccine mandates (or any mandates, for that matter) are a ridiculous idea.
And now for something completely different, something sublime to comfort us a little. Listen to the stellar performance, by Rudolf Lutz and the Choir and Orchestra of the J.S. Bach Foundation, of the final chorale from Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata "Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende" (BWV 27). The conductor’s muttered “Ja” at the end says it all.
Alas, the chorale is not by Bach but by Johann Rosenmüller, who seems to have been an excellent composer in his own right, but who had to flee Leipzig when he was being accused of abusing more than twenty choirboys (a disease not limited to Catholics). We human beings are both wonderful and horrible, and such is the world we live in.