A Visitor Chimes In On COVID Hospitalizations

A visitor sent me an e-mail reacting to recent posts on COVID, ERs, and hospitalizations

About ER waits: We have a friend whose son is an ER nurse at Kaiser. The waits in ER are ridiculously long because people who test positive for covid are showing up BECAUSE they tested positive. No symptoms but the media has convinced us that we are all going to die of this virus that testing positive is a death sentence.

Another reason waits are long at ERs is that some people can't get regular medical care from their docs so they end up at the hospital sicker than should/would have been. True stories I've been told:

A young boy is feeling crummy. He goes to his pediatrician who tests him for covid (the only reason to feel sick, right?). The test is negative so the doc does nothing. Days later his parents are awakened with him vomiting uncontrollably & he's rushed to ER. His appendix has burst. Due to the misdiagnosis he is sicker than most with appendicitis attacks & will have to spend another week in the hospital to clear up the infection (& who knows what else).

A mom is 2 weeks overdue with her pregnancy. Her OB wants to induce her, but the hospital won't allow it because they're saving OB beds for covid overflow. Solution: break her water at the doctor's office, hoping that will start labor & then go to the ER to get admitted (which is what happened).

Our son's friend is a peds respiratory therapist in Orange Couunty [CA]. When she visited in June, she was concerned how few children she was seeing. She was worried that children who had previously been admitted for breathing treatments, etc were being ignored which would lead to bigger problems later.

Our son's co-worker can't get help for gall bladder issues because she has tested negative for covid!!

I remember back in February going to mass, when the priest remarked in his homily on the crush of people shopping for toilet paper. He said he couldn't understand why. I pretty much knew it was because people instinctively anticipated some completely arbitrary government action with unintended consequences, even weeks before governors began to order lockdowns. If there had been a way fo stockpile haircuts, they would have done that, too. People don't get enough credit for being informed consumers.

What we're seeing here, in people crowding ERs because they think a positive COVID test is a death sentence, is a result of media and politicians collaborating to create a panic with daily headlines on recordbreaking, skyrocketing "cases" without mentioning how many positive tests are asymptomatic or just false positives. I would bet they have a much better idea of the actual numbers than they'll let on, while they keep promoting the idea that eating out or going to church will result in mass graves in the public park.

There's going to have to be some major event that breaks the current panic cycle.