Horowitz: Coronavirus hospitalizations down to lowest levels of pandemic. So where is our exit strategy?

The media might keep it a secret, but the hospitals have quietly emptied out their beds of COVID-19 patients, as large swaths of the country appear to have hit a de facto herd immunity threshold. Meanwhile, no matter how much good news we see, those who treat us as subjects continue to create false panic, extend draconian and ineffective restrictions on liberty, and refuse to put out an exit strategy. They are rapidly turning this lockdown into our domestic Afghanistan.

It's now becoming clear, from every state and country that has reached saturation levels of the virus, that the virus burns out roughly around the 20% seroprevalence benchmark, not at the 80% threshold the fearmongers predicted. Whether it's Sweden, New York, or Arizona, the virus is going to do what it does – meaning it spreads for about six weeks in a given region and then moves on. The only question is whether we will continue to destroy our society, mental health, and economy or achieve herd immunity without adding the man-made death toll. Herd immunity is going to happen, whether we aim for it or not.

Still, Dr. Fauci, ever the media showman, refuses to understand the simple math others like Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford Professor John Ioannidis have observed from day one, much less the science behind it. Fauci said the death toll from herd immunity would be "enormous and unacceptable."

"If everyone contracted it, even with the relatively high percentage of people without symptoms," Fauci said during an Instagram live, "a lot of people are going to die."

Now let's put aside the fact that it's not like he has an alternative solution anyway, given that countries like Israel and the Philippines had severe and long lockdowns and they were unsustainable, leading to a late spread despite universal mask-wearing. Fauci is assuming that "everyone" must contract the virus. But study after study has shown that an enormous percentage of the population already has partial immunity, which explains why the virus always seems to hit a brick wall in most places after reaching 20% of the population, more or less.

The southern wave, like all waves, is burning out after 6-8 weeks

Remember the raging spread of the virus in the southern states throughout June and into July? Well, that did not go on forever. According to the CDC's weekly update on Friday, the number of people in the hospital with laboratory-confirmed cases was lower than it has been since the beginning of the lockdown during the week of March 21, even though we are testing many more people today.

As of August 13, according to the CDC's surveillance program, those with coronavirus-like illness (CLI) are just 1.8 percent of emergency department visits, which matches the June 6 level before the surge in the South. In early July, it was up to 4.3%.

Those numbers have bottomed out even lower than May levels, even in the South. Coronavirus patients make up fewer than 3 percent of patients in every region of the country. According to the AP, "Florida reported about 3,900 new cases of the coronavirus Sunday, the lowest daily total in nearly two months." ER visits for COVID-like illness are down 63% since the peak in July.

Arizona has long been past its peak, even though the media continues to act as if the state is on fire. Arizona's hospital census is the lowest it has been since June 3. And although Mondays are usually light reporting days, the state reported zero deaths yesterday and fewer than 500 new cases.

In Texas, hospitalizations are down 43 percent from the July 22 peak and declining rapidly. Even the border counties, which were hit harder than almost anywhere in the country, have declined after a tough July.

Clearly, the southern states barely got exposed to the virus early on in the spring and have now reached their degree of saturation. Except, contrary to the predictions by panicked commentators of multiple New York-level death traps being replicated all over the country, these states kept the situation under control without anything near New York's level of death and panic.

As my friend Ian Miller pointed out, on April 13, in New York and New Jersey combined, a population of 28.2 million had 26,606 COVID hospitalizations. Today, Arizona, California, Georgia, Florida, and Texas, with a combined population of 108 million, have 21,971 COVID patients. And remember, we are better now at identifying the full population of COVID cases than we were in March.

Herd immunity will be achieved at roughly 20 percent in most places

What's becoming clear is that every major population area is going to achieve this 15%-20% threshold whether they like it or not. Even in many unnaturally confined places like ships, prisons, and meatpacking plants, although there are some exceptions, the infection rate seems to be just 25% where one would think 100% would get the virus, given how contagious it is. That could be the power of long-lasting T cell immunity, for much of the population that has already gotten partial immunity from having previously contracted coronavirus colds, unless they are immunocompromised.

Take a look at the contrast between Stockholm and New York City:

One city decided to panic, and one didn't. One caused enormous numbers of excess deaths from a lockdown. But both of them achieved herd immunity between 15% and 20% infection rate, which clearly does not involve "everyone" getting it, as Fauci has suggested. As we are seeing in states like Arizona, new cases plummeted when the rate of positivity in antibody serology tests began surpassing 10 percent and approaching 15 percent.

So, here we are now: What is the exit strategy from the cult-like nihilism and restrictions for a virus that has likely reached its full transmission threshold in most parts of the country?

Sadly, there is none.

It's not that 80% of the country has T cell immunity (it's likely more like 40%-50%), so there will still be people who get the virus here and there, especially with mild or no apparent symptoms. At this rate, this virus might possibly turn into a seasonal coronavirus cold just like the original four coronavirus colds, which some believe to have started out as pandemics. If the mere existence of a cold, which can sometimes be deadly to sick people, is the new pretext for continuing this suicidal national emotional and economic abuse, then it has become our new Afghanistan, dragging on for years without a national interest to justify it or a strategy to exit from it.

Anticipating the coming of a de facto herd immunity threshold even before some questionable vaccine is delivered, some in the media are now scaring people into thinking there is no long-term immunity because antibodies wane over time. However, what they fail to reveal is that the same T cell immunity (even without antibodies) that prevented serious infection the first time around in most people because they already came into contact with other coronavirus pathogens, will most certainly work after having contracted this specific virus.

Even the New York Times wrote an article titled, "Scientists See Signs of Lasting Immunity to Covid-19, Even After Mild Infections thanks to B Cells and T cells."

"Yes, you do develop immunity to this virus, and good immunity to this virus," said Dr. Eun-Hyung Lee, an immunologist at Emory University who was not involved in the studies. "That's the message we want to get out there."

So why are our government officials immune to good news and why do they continue pre-emptively crushing our liberties without an expiration date? Sadly, there is no herd immunity or vaccine against an epidemic of power and control when its primary symptom is panic driven by herd mentality.