Let’s hear it from Google’s Machine Learning (sic!) Glossary what they say an artificial intelligence (AI) is:
I am saying that AI is just a fancy marketing term for machine learning (ML), but others may have different characterizations.
Let’s look at how the Glossary defines machine learning:
Continue readingI wrote about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” (I’m using the term non-vaccinated) and how official numbers do not support that story-line – at least not for the UK – about a week ago. In the post, I cited from the COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report 48.
Data of hospitalisations in weeks 45 to 48:
Switzerland is not running out of ICU beds. It’s a fake news scare peddled by mainstream media and politicians.
The proof is in the data from the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) which records the number of ICU beds available and occupied. The data clearly shows that hospitals are adjusting the number of ICU beds on an as needed basis to keep occupancy as high as possible while still having a number of beds available for emergencies.
Here’s the data from Feb. 15 2021 to Dec. 10 2021:
Continue readingNot long ago, as recent as Nov. 23, several politicians and media have declared there to be a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ (should actually be not-vaccinated). While this misguided rhetoric has now been dialed back, the data now shows, that the claim was not quite substantiated when it was made.
A few weeks ago a letter titled “The epidemiological relevance of the COVID-19-vaccinated population is increasing” was published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe containing the following statement:
Continue readingI am not going to belabor this point any longer, and conclude the topic here with presenting more evidence that the “Swiss hospital are running out of ICU beds” story in the news media is completely false (fake news!).
Hospital are running at a high occupancy, yes, but the ICU-bed capacity is adapted as needed and changes from day to day.
This can can be seen directly from the data provided by the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) by everyone who cares to actually look at the daily numbers and compare them for several days.
Here are the numbers from December 1 and December 2, 2021:
It’s easy to see that for Switzerland, numbers are actually slightly down from Dec. 1 to Dec. 2:
Occupancy is at 81.2% on December 2, which is -0.9% compared to December 1. On November 30, it was 81.1%, but there were 863 ICU beds that day.
So, it’s again obvious, that giving the number “ICU beds are x% occupied” is highly misleading, as the total number, the “100%” changes from day to day.
It’s also easy to see that the situation in Zurich has improved from Dec. 1 to Dec. 2:
So in conclusion, we can see from the numbers, that hospital ICU-beds, are managed on an “as-needed” basis. They are activated and deactivated as the situation requires, and hospitals are not interested in running a high-number of unoccupied ICU-beds, just to keep the statistics nice. Of course, there is a maximum number to which ICU-beds can be increased, but has that been reached yet? We don’t know and are not told in any statistics.
The real limiting factor is staff-availability, not number of physical beds, by the way. But curiously, for that, we don’t see any statistics, and we also are not told, what is done to alleviate the pressure on the medical staff.
Today, we can again read alarmist news about hospitals running at or near capacity, like the following from 20min.ch:
Wie die Zürcher Gesundheitsdirektorin mitteilt, sind 42 Personen auf der Intensivstation, davon 24 am Beatmungsgerät. Das Universitätsspital Zürich ist zu 98 Prozent ausgelastet.
As the Zurich health director reports, 42 people are in the intensive care unit, 24 of them on the ventilator. The University Hospital Zurich is 98 percent full.
Source: 20min.ch
Let’s look at the official numbers from the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health again. Here, I have compared the numbers from November 28 with those of November 30:
For Switzerland we make some observations:
Let’s look at the numbers for Canton of Zurich:
So, the key observations are:
I’ve looked at the current situation with hospital capacity in Switzerland, according to the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), with data current as of November 28, 2021:
As of November 28, 2021, ICU-bed situation is a follows in Switzerland:
Does this make sense to you? I does not seem to be what you would expect to see with a vaccine that is working.
Compare vaccination rate in New Zealand:
With daily reported new cases in New Zealand:
In our last look at hospitalization numbers for Texas at the end of August, we noted that there was significant rise in hospitalizations.
Some ten days later, we look again at the number to see whether the numbers continued to rise, supposedly due to the Delta-Variant of SarsCoV2. The data is again from the Texas Department of Health Services and current as of September 10, 2021.
As we can see, the numbers have stopped going up and have begun to come down. This is while there are still no COVID19 measures are in place – they were all lifted by Texas Governor Abbott and have not been put back in force.
We’re going to keep an eye on this situation to see how it develops during the autumn and winter.
Back in July, we looked at the situation of hospitalizations in Texas, one month after Governor Abbott lifted all COVID19 restrictions in Texas, and as was noted, there was some rise in hospitalizations.
Now over a month later, we’ll have another look to see whether hospitalizations picked up or not. The data is again from the Texas Department of Health Services and current as of August 21, 2021.
Hospitalizations did go up and almost reached peak level, but seem to be going down already. This seems to be due to the Delta-Variant of the virus, and also led to some hospitals running out of ICU beds, as the Texas Tribune writes.
There are still no state-wide restrictions being re-introduced, and we’ll have to see how this situation develops.
