Horowitz: Chasing our own tails has become the new pandemic

As for those of you who are left, I will make their hearts so fearful in the lands of their enemies that the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. They will run as though fleeing from the sword, and they will fall, even though no one is pursuing them. ~ Leviticus 26:36

The hospitals throughout America are stressed and stretched thin. No, unlike during other times of the pandemic, there is not a flood of people coming in with blood clotting and respiratory distress. According to doctors throughout the country, they are stressed from endless testing of a mild virus, which creates logistically consuming quarantines and strains due to all of the staff who must quarantine, not to mention all those fired for not getting the shot that doesn’t work. Thus, the entirety of the strain on the hospitals now is coming from the response to the virus, not the virus itself. When will we finally flatten the curve of fear?

Within several weeks, it became apparent from South Africa and some European countries that barely anyone got clinically ill from Omicron. Yet, of course, in America, everything must always be different, or so we are told. Mask mandates are being brought back, the panic levels are through the roof, and the establishment is doubling and tripling down on the vaccines that quite literally don’t stop the virus. But now, two years into this virus, some media sources are finally reporting the truth about the COVID hospitalization numbers.

“I have not intubated a single COVID patient during this Omicron surge,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF, in an email to SFGate. “We have a total of 5 patients with COVID on ventilators across our 4 hospitals. An average of 1.25 intubated COVID patients per hospital is a good news story."

So what is the problem in the hospitals? Fearful patients who aren’t sick, quarantining doctors for a cold, and likely all of the staff members fired for not getting the shots that clearly failed to stop this spread. We are chasing our tails! SFGate reports that Dr. Noble determined 70% of all patients in the hospital for COVID were really there for other reasons but got ensnared in the universal testing regime. "The real COVID crisis that our hospitals are facing is a severe staffing shortage that is compromising the quality of our care," Noble said. Even the vast majority of those who do come in for COVID “need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance."

Noble credits the high vaccination rates for the lack of critical illness, but South Africa will forever serve as a control group against this theory, given that the country did not see a surge in seriously ill patients despite a low vaccination rate. Clearly, the variant is milder.

Further south in Los Angeles, two-thirds of the COVID patients were detected through mass testing but were presenting to the hospital for other reasons.

As other countries experience mild illness even among seniors, so many of the public health officials are attempting to suggest that somehow in America even children are getting seriously ill from Omicron, which makes no sense. It turns out that they are in the hospitals for routine seasonal viruses but test positive for COVID, revealing an irony known to any hospital worker — that we have long lived with winter pathogens for years that have hospitalized children in greater numbers than COVID. Yet to this day, many children are forced to wear masks for hours a day.

Fox5 reports that in San Diego, “Pediatric hospitalizations are on the rise, but not from COVID.”

“The kids are doing OK with the Omicron variant,” said Dr. John Bradley, director of infectious diseases at Rady Children’s Hospital.

“COVID isn’t the problem,” Dr. Bradley said. “It’s all the other viruses we’re seeing every year like RSV, and we’re beginning to see influenza, but there’s no kids admitted in the hospital COVID-pneumonia, period.”

Over on the East Coast in New Jersey, just 49% of the COVID hospital numbers can be considered as there “primarily because of their COVID diagnosis.” What about the children? Just 27 of the 82 children with COVID in the hospital are there for COVID as the primary diagnosis, with no word as to how many are in respiratory distress.

This insanity is beautifully depicted by Phil Kerpen’s tally of overall hospital numbers. While the number of COVID “patients” has grown by 74,000 since a month ago, the number of total admissions is down by nearly 8,000. In other words, there is absolutely no surge on the hospitals.

It would be like counting cold cases in the hospital every winter.

Just how much has Omicron attenuated vs. Delta? A new preprint study of 52,000 COVID patients treated in the Kaiser Permanente Southern California health care system in December found that Omicron had a 52% lower hospitalization rate, a 74% reduction in the odds of being treated in the ICU, and a 70% shorter average hospital stay. “Zero cases with Omicron variant infection received mechanical ventilation, as compared to 11 cases with Delta variant infections throughout the period of follow-up,” observed the research team, which included staff of the CDC.

Any sane country would react to Omicron by living life normally and just treating outpatient the people who need treatment. Instead, officials are doubling down on firing staff, panicking over a cold, and denying treatment for the few who still need it. Now, the Biden administration has ordered insurance companies to cover even more testing while denying coverage of ivermectin!

What the circuitous cycle of testing, fear, mandates, and hospital staff shortages demonstrates is that to the extent there is an emergency, it’s the urgency to end the emergency declarations.