The Tages-Anzeiger has a curious piece on the sustained excess mortality trend that has gripped Switzerland since the start of the year. The persistent slight elevation, which has never been seen before, has yielded 3,000 excess deaths through the end of August. (View Highlight)
Particularly unusual is the duration of the trend. More than half of all weeks since the beginning of the year have tallied more deaths than average, an as-yet unobserved phenomenon (View Highlight)
It’s obviously not the virus that’s killing these people. The preferred Science explanation is that a substantial portion of these deaths are “heat-related” and that these are the unfortunate consequences of climate change. In truth, the summer heat has been vastly overplayed by a press eager to transition back to climate-change narratives, and Swiss heat deaths even in record-setting years, like 2003, don’t break the 1,000 mark. (View Highlight)
The Swiss healthcare system is also under considerable pressure, and here too nobody knows the reason. (View Highlight)
Why are so many people suddenly ill? Where are all the patients coming from? “If we only knew," says [Esther] Wiesendanger [another clinic administrator]. “I have the feeling that more people are sick and also more often.” But she won’t speculate on the reasons. Since March, the pressure has increased noticeably. About a third of the patients currently visit the practice because of Covid and other respiratory symptoms, in addition to sprains, cuts, wasp stings, back pain, bladder infections, gastrointestinal diseases and much more. (View Highlight)