The MSM is echoing with cries of “The Delta Variant is more contagious!” This is somehow supposed to bring us to the needle on our knees, weeping for our insensitive, snowflake triggering refusal to get the shot sooner. We should have realized that our questions about the safety of the shot are actually “violence.” Certainly we don’t wish to be violent?
Fast on the heels of the “Contagion!” scream is the screed that “hospitals have not yet reached maximum capacity.” Somehow this is supposed to frighten us back into ineffective and harmful lockdowns in the futile hope that something we will do is actually going to be the little Dutch boy’s finger in the dike, stopping the deluge. But The Gray Lady doth protest too much. (cf. Hamlet, Act III, Scene II)
“Contagious” sounds like the Delta Variant is a really, really awful and deadly bug. The original COVID-19 was so bad that if you got near it, you were going to die. The only thing missing was the date on the headstone. But now you will assume room temperature the moment you get near Delta.
Take a breath. A deep, cleansing breath. That’s it. Now you’re ready to hear the facts. And, by the way, there are facts that aren’t “your truth” or “my truth.” They are “the truth.”
“Contagious” simply does not mean “deadly.” It just means you can catch it. “More contagious” just means “easier to catch.” And if we really want to talk about a highly contagious bug, we should discuss the common cold. It’s one of the most contagious bugs out there, but it doesn’t kill people very often, if at all. For most people it lasts a week. If they treat it, it only lasts seven days…
By now you get the picture. The lame-stream media simply will not tell any story that doesn’t turn a moderate viral infection into the Black Death, which killed between thirty to sixty percent of Europeans during the fourteenth century. But many have begun to realize that the original Wuhan Flu simply did not kill very many people. We saw news reports of refrigerated trailers full of dead bodies, but most of us don’t know anyone who was seriously impacted by it. I personally know several, and they all recovered with no illness worse than the seasonal flu would cause. A close friend in active medical practice has seen a single COVID death, and that person was elderly with multiple severe illnesses before the virus tipped him over the edge. We have to decide whether we will believe the Quixotic Quislings of Quarantine or our own lying eyes.
We have to discuss numbers. Various scoreboards have listed over half a million American deaths from COVID-19. The current occupant of the White House has repeated this, using it to decry the fact that somehow every American (but no illegal alien!) should be jabbed. We can’t take that number at face value. On April 14, 2020, the CDC published a definition that a COVID case is defined by “confirmatory laboratory evidence for COVID-19.” After that point, the “total cases” multiplied.
Various analyses using the earlier CDC case definition – a person with typical signs and symptoms plus, if needed, lab confirmation – show about six percent of that half million actually died from COVID-19. That’s about thirty thousand, a number very close to seasonal flu. And, by the way, cases of the flu are still defined in the original way.
When we allow a positive lab test, which incidentally, is completely unstandardized and utterly unsuited for the way it’s used, to rule the count, we find that politics and financial interests force a massive over count. Politicians use it as a way to drive the unquestioning public into submission to useless mandates, and hospitals use it to extract many thousands of dollars for each “COVID-19 case” under the CARES Act. The only people who lose are…
Us.
But the language manglers aren’t done. “Hospitals have not yet reached maximum capacity!” The implication is that admissions for the Delta Variant are rising so rapidly and cases are so severe that in mere moments we will run out of ICU beds. A moment of careful reflection is in order.
Exactly the same fear was ginned up early in the pandemic last year. New York Governor Cuomo was so panicked that he announced New York was about to run out of ventilators and bed space. President Trump was so helpful that even this vocal political adversary complimented his rapid deployment of a field hospital to the Javits Center and a Navy hospital ship to New York harbor. But those 3,910 beds barely saw any patients, and the extra ventilators President Trump got built went unused. Ultimately many were sent to foreign countries.
An occasional hospital ICU did briefly fill to overcapacity, but that happens all the time. Intensive Care beds are very expensive to maintain, so hospitals routinely manage them in a way to keep them as full as possible. During my years of doing anesthesia for open heart surgery, delays due to fully occupied beds were nearly a daily occurrence.
Nurses being overworked due to understaffing is no surprise, either. Because staff is the largest expense at a hospital, nurses get sent home if the patient census falls, and others get pushed into double shifts when census is high. Hospitals don’t want to spend one penny extra, staff discontent be damned. So when there were overworked nurses with full ICUs, it was same-old-same-old, not news. But the MSM contorted it into major news.
“Hospitals have not yet reached maximum capacity!” is simply another piece of panic porn. It’s a true statement that is completely meaningless. If a large percent of the beds were empty, as they were when all elective admissions were cancelled due the pandemic in the spring of 2020, then “they had not reached maximum capacity.”
By now it should be very clear that the language lizards on the Left have tried to get you to believe three things before breakfast that simply aren’t true – that the Delta Variant is somehow more deadly than the original bug (It’s less deadly), that medical services are just about to dry up because the variant is more deadly, and that there are no effective treatments. And this last one is a clear case of deliberate malpractice by Fauci et. al. They deliberately misused language to get you to believe the first two. And their slanders and silence on the last are mind-boggling.
The word from the CDC was that we should not use hydroxychloroquine because it doesn’t work (It does). We should use remdesivir because it will work (It doesn’t). This list is long and distinguished, but it points out a key problem with the CDC. Fauci’s minions never put out a list of therapies that are beneficial, unlike their recommendations for almost every other disease. Their only action was to trash approaches they didn’t invent.
There are many very useful COVID treatments. This disease is very manageable, and has low mortality. It’s time to tell the tyrants to F___ O__.
Ted Noel MD posts on social media as DoctorTed and @Vidzette.