Tappanch, thanks! Could you calculate and tell us what this would mean for Hungary's representation in the European Parliament?
40 016
Today is a sorrow day, today have passed the number of 40 000 covid deaths in Hungary.
A short search on internet today at 9:28 has shown that only 444, Euronews, 24.hu, Klubrádió, Privátbankár, telex, Magyar Hang, and ezalenyeg.hu told their readers about this fact, the regime media are at least now still silent about the news their own government told. Even the official governmental corona dedicated website only tells on its statistic overview “Budapest 6 750 Vidék [countryside] 33 266,” but no national total ►HU.
While in December Orbán told us on his press conference that a 4th vaccination will be too much even for him, his minister Miklós Kásler of human resources, responsible of the health care as well, declared that he is sure that this will be necessary ►HU. He repeated his claim that all vaccines are even good. Kásler publicly admitted that hard times are ahead. He acknowledged that the 5th wave has already begun and we have to be prepared to see 13 000 infected and 200 deaths a day – if no mutations of the virus occur. It is not clear whether he talked about omicron or not, I am afraid he said this to be safe if way higher numbers will happen.
Still are only 6 294 707 Hungarians vaccinated as today (this official number counts everybody with at least a single dose.) And still the regime tells that vaccination is the only mean against the virus. While this is true for protection at least against severe sickness (according to Kásler in the same interview 88 – 98 % against death) the situation in the hospitals is still far from normal, especially for all those with other sicknesses. Impossible to tell how many are suffering or dying, just because their cancer, heart disease, or what ever else can’t be cared of. All this doesn’t matter, more than ordering the people wearing in shops or public transport a mask doesn’t happen – and only some store personal is afraid of the heavy fines or even closing is not allowing wearing the mask with uncovered noses or even just under the chin, many don’t care. Infected persons are no longer sent in quarantine, let alone contact persons. The official number of actually infected (113 160) is more than 4 times higher than the number of quarantined (25 978!) But who is not vaccinated and allowed to cross an outer Schengen borders or to fly-in will be quarantined. Saying this Italy has introduced a couple of days ago that everybody above 50 years old has to be vaccinated, Greece does comparable from January 16th for those above 60 and Austria wants to introduce this measure for everybody above 14 years old ►EN. Orbán does nothing at all, he is showing again what coward he is.
And still there are no plans to vaccinate those senior citizens that had been given Sinopharm earlier with a working vaccine, besides eventually the 3rd dose. Péter Márki-Zay called giving a vaccine to those older than 60 that has not been tested on this group on Sunday being genocide ►HU. Regime’s “Demokrata” (forgive me for not linking this ugly paper, google it if you need to read it) had nothing better to do to correct MZP hinting that the WHO granted permission to Sinopharm – of course without mentioning that the same WHO clearly pointed out in its “emergency use listing” the fact that it has not been tested for this group ►EN. Already a few days earlier Márki-Zay has drawn anger of the regime, because he correctly stated that “The fact is that a significant portion of these people vote for FIDESZ. And it were these elderly who were given a Chinese vaccine that even the Chinese did not give over 60? I think that FIDESZ betrayed the elderly in an infinitely vile way” and “how much FIDESZ destroys retirees.” ►HU.
Ákos Hadházy has right now filed a criminal complaint for the approval of the “Eastern vaccines” upon political pressure against all medical safety and responsibility ►HU. He compared this to a bus driver driving with 120 through ten red lights, while 40 passengers are sitting behind him, just that this is not about 40, but about 100 000s of people endangered ►HU.
Good news is that the German Paul Ehrlich Institut, examining vaccines for the EMA, the European Medical Agency, told that BioNTech is on a good road with the omicron adapted version of the vaccine. This will be already during the 1st half of the year available for vaccinations ►HU, said institute leader Klaus Cichutek on ZDF, German public TV.
In the meanwhile the joint opposition has issued a press statement ►HU. The opposition expresses condolences to family of 40 000 Hungarian coronavirus victims and promises better health care, since “there is still no meaningful epidemic management, no elucidation, no sufficient number of tests, just as the public does not receive honest, fact-based, transparent information.”
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Hungary is on the way to becoming no1 here. WaPo reports the 4 countries with the highest death rates reported worldwide are:
Peru, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Hungary
Congratulations – or not?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/mapping-spread-new-coronavirus/?utm_campaign=wp_to_your_health
OT but typical news:
Many German “Querdenker” i e Covid deniers and other loonies have just moved to Bulgaria because there were no mask mandates and other rules to limit their “freedom” – and also because living there is cheaper.
Wait, should I have written
“Life is cheap”???
I noticed that Orbán has expressed his condolences to the president of Kazakhstan, who has ordered to shoot into the demonstrators, but I didn’t find a word from him concerning the 40 016 dead Hungarians.
With the rise of Omicron it is more than clear that all of the existing vaccines will not prevent infection or the spreading of the virus. It is clear that the leading two vaccines will more than likely keep people out of hospitals and from dying if they do not have underlying health conditions or are immune compromised. For people with undying conditions there is no clear data as yet relating to Omicron and the impact of vaccinations even with booster shots.
Here in Chicago, the infection rate has spread so rapidly that our public transportation service in the city called the Chicago Transit Authority is reducing daily services due to a lack of workers. Some hospitals are down between 10 and 20% of their staff due to infections. My wife and I were both called to active status on the Illinois medical reserve system for retired medical staff (I am a trained paramedic and my wife is trained respiratory therapist and occupational therapist), but we both declined service because of our age and the real possibility or infection in a hospital. Many, many of the medical staff in Chicago’s hospitals have retired if they can adding to the provider crisis. It is unclear how many Chicago Police officers currently are quarantined for having Covid, the police will not reveal the actual data apparently for fear of encouragement of massive street gangs to go on looting sprees again in the city. In general in Chicago it’s impossible to currently buy a rapid Covid test and lines for commercial and public testing sites are very long. Our public schools were closed here for several days due to the teachers union refusing to go into schools without additional testing of students and are returning today with a plan to test 10% of the students each week and using that information to create a standard to shutting down in person instruction at the school site if it reaches a 30% infection rate.
There is some optimism that Omicron here will peak in the next two weeks from various epidemiologists on the news. But when the actual math used in making such predictions is examined there are many questions about the assumptions being used in the calculations see https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/opinion/omicron-covid-us.html. We even have a big fight over this issue among medical experts relating to whether children should even be in schools see https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2022/1/10/22877354/school-safety-omicron-cps-public-debate-mitigation-masks-cases-contact-tracing.
István is correct to mention the possibility of adapted vaccines for Omicron, but there are also models by epidemiologists that the variants will be appearing too fast for distribution of adapted vaccines to be implemented. The statistical modeling is extremely complex and the underlying data being collected is shaky too so who knows how valid that discussion is. So many will have to just accept getting Covid and hopefully only getting moderately sick. Of course for those of us who are older and have health related conditions the future is less bright to be honest.
About omicron here data are everything but sure. While Müller Cecília said today that every third sick is infected by omicron, the test results of Neumann Labs show 90 % omicron. Although the base is not the same, the difference is extreme.
https://hang.hu/belfold/muller-cecilia-mar-a-megbetegedesek-harmadat-az-omikron-okozza-135591
https://telex.hu/koronavirus/2022/01/11/mar-a-pozitiv-esetek-90-szazalekanal-az-omikront-azonositjak-az-egyik-legnagyobb-hazai-maganlaborban
However, it is completely unpredictable whether future mutations will make vaccinations problematic or not. There were variants that never spread widely, while all up to omicron were targeted by the EMA approved vaccine well and still now they have positive effects. Omicron is different by the number of mutations, especially effecting the spike protein, which did not happen before. Of course we have to expect future mutations, but nobody knows what they will be like. We will have to learn to live with the virus, only that it will lose its harm for a good part after the population got widely immune against it. As the former German minister of health said: After this winter everybody will be vaccinated, recovered, or dead.
Unfortunately public heath authorities here in the USA are trying to shift messages to the public from get fully vaccinated to prevent infection to get fully vaccinated to prevent significant illness or death once you do get infected. It is a difficult switch and the anti-vaccine crowd uses it to promote their own attempts to undermine attempts to vaccinate a higher percentage of our population. Currently in the City of Chicago only 50.1% of the African American population is fully vaccinated and there is significant resistance to vaccination in that community based on conspiracy theories going back in time to the notorious medical experiments, called the Tuskegee trials where hundreds of Black men died who could have likely been saved from syphilis, about 68.4% of the white population in Chicago is fully vaccinated so the difference here is obvious.
Of course the deaths from Covid are also much higher among African Americans in Chicago, in fact the rate of death for African Americans in Chicago compared to whites is far worse than the differences in full vaccination rates. The rate for black residents is very near double that of white residents due to lower rates of full vaccinations and higher pre-existing health conditions. We are seeing similar huge discrepancies in death rates for rural areas of the USA that heavily supported Trump and urban metro areas that voted heavily for Biden too. Like Hungary the USA is a mess. We get better data here than in Hungary, but the data itself does not solve our problems.
While I completely agree that a shift in public communication is very problematic, but what would be the alternative in this case? In the beginning there was a hope that vaccinated persons could not infect others, if they got in contact with the virus. While it was before omicron at least significantly reduced, this might be no longer the case at the very moment. At least who has got his 3 shots is way less endangered as all researches tell us. I am not competent to check them, but everything I hear or read points into this direction. And here a bit egoism concerning the own health is good for the community as well! If not in terms of spreading infections at least in taking the pressure from the hospitals. I can’t tell you about ethnic groups here, since such a statistic would be illegal in Hungary. My observation here is that the least educated are the most attracted by horror stories about the vaccines. From my connections in Western Europe I know that there is a second group of those rejecting all modern medicine in combination with an alternative lifestyle, a group at least not significantly is present in Hungary. And you are right, data alone never solve a problem of course, but they can and should be used to find the solution! “Our laboratory” Austria did so with way better success than Hungary’s idleness.
OT – As announced this afternoon: The elections will take place on April 3rd, 2022
Thanks for the summary of the disastrous situation we are and will be in during the 4th and 5th wave. The Kassler´s prediction about the 200 covid victims a day shows clearly that the regime gave up. It is sad, but that is how and who they are. It seems for the moment enough people “earned” money with the pandemic. The whole project now concentrates on how to hide the disaster for as many voters as possible.
Let’s not forget these are the official figures. The real numbers are probably much higher.
In a few months time we’ll see the statistics including the “excess mortality” and also life expectancy figures. Afaik life expectancy has already gone down in 2020 compared to the years before, not only in Hungary but all over the world.
Germany eg had more than a million deaths last year for the first time since the war, at least 50 000 more than expected. In some months the death rate was at least 20% than the average of the last years.
And now we’re waiting for official numbers for Hungary – or will they be kept secret for the next 30 years like so much information here?
From March 2020 until September 2021 the excess mortality in Hungary was 28 427. This article was published a few hours later than my post:
https://444.hu/2022/01/11/a-koronavirusjarvany-elso-masfel-eveben-28-427-fos-volt-a-tobblethalandosag-magyarorszagon