COVID is causing a great fright but it’s not the one you think. I am beginning to think that the media does not, under any circumstances, want the pandemic to end and neither does Anthony Fauci. COVID is not something to be trivialized but news outlets are competing with one another to see who can gin COVID up the most and create the biggest panic. To wit:
Covid-19 surge is ‘unprecedented’ (msn.com)
The new year is starting with a massive influx of Covid-19 that’s different from any other during this pandemic, doctors say. “We’re seeing a surge in patients again, unprecedented in this pandemic,” said Dr. James Phillips, chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University Hospital.
“What’s coming for the rest of the country could be very serious. And they need to be prepared.” Even health care workers are getting sidelined during the rapid rise of the Omicron variant, the most contagious strain of novel coronavirus to hit the US.
Fauci Warns of Complacency With Virus Set to Fill Hospitals
So that if you have many, many, many more people with a less level of severity, that might kind of neutralize the positive effect of having less severity,” said Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Preliminary data from Scotland shows that omicron “is associated with a two-thirds reduction in the risk of Covid-19 hospitalization when compared to delta.” However, the same study showed that it was 10 times more likely than delta to infect people who’d already had Covid.
Omicron also seems to favor those who have been vaccinated.
New CDC Covid guidance could be a recipe for serious trouble
This past week, many essential workers have again felt that they are being treated as expendable after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines that shortened the isolation period for those with Covid-19 from 10 days to five days — a move that many workers saw as a concession to business and a danger to workers.
Omicron passes much quickly than delta and is far milder in symptoms.
Dr. Craig Spencer, an associate professor in Emergency Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center, tweeted Tuesday that fewer patients were “gasping for air” and requiring oxygen, unlike the first wave in March 2020.
“But there’s just SO much of it and it’s impacting patients in different ways,” Spencer said, referring to his experience during an ER shift in New York City.
Now pay attention
Spencer said “record numbers” of people with COVID-19 were attending the ER, as well as “extremely high” numbers of non-COVID-19 patients. “During the first surge, COVID was the only thing we saw in our ERs,” he said.
Indeed. Right now, about half of those admitted to hospitals in NY are NOT being admitted for COVID
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul released data Friday breaking down COVID-19 hospitalizations by those who were admitted due to the virus and those who were admitted for other reasons but were found to have the illness.
Included in the data was a chart showing “how many hospitalized individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 were admitted for COVID-19/COVID-19 complications and how many were admitted for non-COVID-19 conditions.”
Let’s scare ’em real good.
The Next Big COVID Variant Could Be a Triple Whammy Nightmare (msn.com)
Even as cases have surged, deaths haven’t—at least not to the same degree. Omicron is highly transmissible but generally not as severe as some older variants—“lineages” is the scientific term.
We got lucky. But that luck might not hold. Many of the same epidemiologists who have breathed a sigh of relief over Omicron’s relatively low death rate are anticipating that the next lineage might be much worse.
Fretting over a possible future lineage that combines Omicron’s extreme transmissibility with the severity of, say, the previous Delta lineage, experts are beginning to embrace a new public health strategy that’s getting an early test run in Israel: a four-shot regimen of messenger-RNA vaccine.
Generally speaking, as viruses mutate, they tend to become less virulent and despite omicron being highly infectious it is proving to be less lethal.
The World Health Organization said Thursday that a record 9.5 million COVID-19 cases were tallied over the last week as the omicron variant of the coronavirus swept the planet, a 71% increase from the previous 7-day period that the U.N. health agency likened to a “tsunami.” However, the number of weekly recorded deaths declined.
“Last week, the highest number of COVID-19 cases were reported so far in the pandemic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. He said the WHO was certain that was an underestimate because of a backlog in testing around the year-end holidays.
In its weekly report on the pandemic, the agency said the weekly count amounted to 9,520,488 new cases — with 41,178 deaths recorded last week compared to 44,680 in the week before that.
This was also noted in Vermont.
Growing numbers of children are being admitted to hospitals, but for what? I think what we’re seeing is a resurgence of the flu or even flurona, the newest addition to the lexicon.
There are many different types of viruses that are capable of infecting people. Viruses that cause the flu and COVID-19 are two examples, but there’s also HIV, the chicken pox virus, rabies virus, the common cold and many others.
It has always been possible for one person to be infected with two or more different viruses at once. And with flu season coinciding with a new COVID-19 surge, there’s a greater chances that a handful of people will test positive for both viruses at the same time.
Doctors call these instances co-infections. Though uncommon, last year’s flu season also saw a handful of cases of flu and COVID-19 in the same person at the same time.
Without genomic sequencing it may not be possible to discern the flu from omicron. Here is a guide to the symptoms but remember there’s a lot of overlap.
Just as we’re calming down some investigators are claiming they’ve detected the Transformers version of COVID and are calling it Deltacron. Others are suggesting this is a contamination.
There’s even more COVID porn. Soon we’ll be needing weekly boosters. Moderna’s CEO says the effectiveness of the current booster falls off within a few months. Pfizer is cutting the waiting time for the booster to five months.
There is no doubt that vaccination diminishes severity of the worst strains of COVID. It may also lessen the effects of omicron. But vaccination does not prevent transmission.
People are jamming up hospital ER’s demanding tests. As you know, Biden failed to order more tests and is rationing COVID treatments along racial lines. The CDC cannot tell us how many people have died from COVID or died with COVID. People are being fired for failure to vaccinate but COVID positive staff are being allowed to return to work because of staffing shortages. We’re still funding Wuhan. It is hard to imagine an inepter handling.
It’s all very confusing. Pay attention most of all to deaths but even then, we need to know which strain is responsible. If you’re going to get something, omicron is your choice.
Try not to get sucked into the COVID porn vortex.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.