US West Coast hospitals overwhelmed by Omicron with thousands of doctors and nurses infected
Hospitals from California to Washington state are in the worst crisis of the pandemic as a massive spike in cases of the now dominant and highly transmissible Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 rips through the population, shattering records and infecting even fully vaccinated frontline health care workers.
In the United States, this week’s seven-day average of new daily cases has surpassed half a million, a record high, with nearly 120,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19, near an all-time high. The Omicron variant now makes up around 95 percent of all new COVID-19 cases in the United States according to a Tuesday update by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In Oregon, the average of new daily cases has reached 3,331 per day with 580 out of 768 adult ICU beds filled. The Oregon State Hospital in Salem is pausing new patient admissions due to a COVID-19 outbreak with 29 patients and 32 employees in the facility testing positive. Hospital Superintendent Dolly Matteucci announced in a letter on Tuesday that “We expect that number to rise, given the high-risk exposures involved.”
Over the last week, Washington state has averaged 8,123 new confirmed cases per day with 77 percent of ICU beds filled, 915 out of 1,189.
Dr. John Lynch, the medical director of Harborview Medical Center’s infection control program, said that hospitalizations are pushing Washington’s health care system “closer than they’ve ever been [to] a crisis point.” Washington is facing hospitalization rates higher than at any other point in the pandemic.
Despite the constant lies pushed by the ruling class and their mouthpieces in corporate media that children are not severely impacted by COVID, more than 325,000 children in the US tested positive for COVID-19 last week.
Under these conditions Seattle Children’s Hospital has seen a record number of patients. Shaquita Bell, a pediatrician at Seattle Children, told NPR that “ERs are at 200 percent. Like, our ER here in Seattle, at Seattle Children’s, is operating at all-time high records of patients seeking care. We’ve had record rates of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV infections. Children are being admitted with both COVID and RSV infections.”
Dr. John McGuire, the hospital’s chief of the Division of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, explained to KIRO 7, “I expect if this wave continues to rise in the next several weeks, we probably will see more kids require hospitalization. It’s interesting we’re seeing Omicron coming into our region during a time when kids are not in school. So we’ll see what happens in a week or two.”
In Hawaii, there is currently a wave of infections far surpassing anything previously recorded on the islands with an average of 2,780 new confirmed cases per day, well above the September 2020 peak of 910 daily new cases. As of this writing, 121 out of 200 ICU beds in the state are filled and hospitalizations are projected to rise. Health officials confirm that at least 1,000 frontline clinical workers across the state are out sick after testing positive for the virus.
In California, newly reported cases shot up from 46,362 on January 3 to an astounding 141,792 on January 4. There has been a growth of 500 percent over a 14-day period according to the New York Times COVID-19 tracker. The seven-day average for the state has reached 57,019, surpassing the previous record of 44,770 cases per day set during the deadly winter surge of 2020.
Cases and hospitalizations are among the highest in Southern California, with San Diego, Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties reporting daily average rates of more than 133 cases per 100,000 residents and a hospitalization rate of 21 for every 100,000 residents. California’s state COVID-19 dashboard is reporting a test positivity rate of 21.3 percent, up from last year’s high of 17 percent.
All over the region people are lining up for hours at testing sites where lines stretch multiple city blocks. With pharmacies selling out of rapid test kits many hospitals are reporting that their emergency rooms are being overwhelmed by patients with symptoms who are seeking testing and treatment.
Hospitals are also overwhelmed by the rise in cases among staff. A worker at UC San Diego (UCSD) Medical Center told the WSWS, “today we were told at a town hall meeting that many operations had to be canceled at the hospital because we are seeing a major staffing shortage due to hundreds of doctors and nurses catching COVID after the holiday season. We were also told that, even though they were vaccinated, some of these workers are out sick from COVID for a second time.”
Data presented at the UCSD Medical Center town hall shows a huge surge in new infections among health care workers with 593 employees out of work after testing positive. Ninety percent of these workers were symptomatic and 10 percent were testing positive for a second time. Of the workers testing positive, 32.6 percent were nurses, 24.3 percent physicians and 24.3 percent were front desk and administrative workers.
Despite the clear danger Omicron is posing to workers and patients, preventing infection is not prioritized at the hospital. One speaker at the town hall explained that, “quarantine guidelines are being changed to match the new CDC guidelines in order to accommodate the staffing shortages.”
Workers are outraged that new CDC guidelines reducing isolation time for those who are infected from 10 days to five days are being pursued all across the medical system.
A nurse in Los Angeles told the WSWS, “Five day quarantine is BS, if people would just come outright to say let’s get everyone infected for herd immunity then sure why even bother to quarantine … I can’t come to work out of being conscientious. I’d get my coworkers sick … Five days for me to recover from a simple cold and cough is ok, not COVID. Positive is positive, asymptomatic or not. You carry the virus, you can transmit, isn’t that simple?”
As a result of the current surge, hospital morgues are filling up and one eyewitness told CBS Los Angeles that upwards of 20 decomposing bodies of COVID-19 patients were left outside in the rain at Gardena Community Hospital in Los Angeles while hospital workers rearranged the almost full portable overflow freezer. Hospital workers were seen lifting the bodies into mobile freezers as fluids leaked from body bags. Several of the health care workers were tearful as they left the scene.
Vidal Herrera, an owner of an independent autopsy company who saw pictures of the Gardena incident, told CBS LA, “I could see a lot of bodily fluids, and right there the pathogens—that can expose security guards and whomever walks in there. A body should never be there for more than two weeks.”
“Incidents like this are not uncommon,” Herrera noted grimly, adding, “It’s going to get worse with COVID surges. It’s far from over.”
The fight against the pandemic is a fight against capitalism. We urge health care workers to contact the WSWS, engage in the Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic and form rank-and-file committees in your workplace and link your struggle with workers around the world to fight for the eradication of the pandemic.
JOE BIDEN - ONCE A LAWYER, ALWAYS A LIAR!
Conceit, Lies, Greed, and the Covid Debacle
If you haven’t seen the CDC map of Covid “Community Transmission in the US by County,” it’s practically all red, meaning transmission is at its highest level. The U.S. is awash in Covid infections. After nearly two years – and heaven knows how much money and resources spent and how much wreckage – Covid hasn’t been whipped, as laughable old Joe Biden vowed. In fact, as viruses do, Covid is spawning variants.
The saving grace is that the omicron strain appears to be milder, signaling a wind down. Hospitalizations and deaths from omicron appear lower.
Per the virology, viruses “shift” or “drift.” Drifted viruses change gradually, allowing your immune system to provide “cross-protection.” Shifted viruses – Covid – represent an “abrupt, major change” and can trigger epidemics or pandemics. Viruses typically drift, because killing off hosts isn’t much of a survival strategy. Nature, not man, is resolving the contagion, as was the case with the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19. For sensible people, that should be a sobering realization.
Yet, sensibleness isn’t so common. The critical question is: Will enough of us draw the right lessons from the pandemic or are we doomed to repeat our mistakes again and again? And not just mistakes in the public health sphere.
In the name of safeguarding public health, we’ve granted elites blank checks. Americans have been compliant with Covid edicts – all too compliant, for the most part, in that our fundamental rights – supposedly protected by the Constitution – were suspended. Our businesses, schools, and churches were closed, while liquor stores, strip clubs, and abortion mills were deemed essential. All for what? To, again, see the CDC map bathed in red? Isn’t that a wee bit like Groundhog Day? Haven’t our leaders and experts manufactured an epic failure?
What the current sea-to-sea infection outbreak tells us is that the remedies to Covid that our governmental and public health elites have imposed on us – and that’ve been pushed by social and legacy media – are, first and foremost, the products of conceits. The attendant costs of those conceits – levied on individuals and society – won’t be paid off for many years, if at all.
As Dan Bongino has formulated, if masks work, why aren’t they working? If lockdowns work, why haven’t they “stopped the spread?” What about vaccines? They were billed as preventatives, not therapeutics. If vaccinations are really preventative, why haven’t they stopped breakthrough infections? Why are many of the vaccinated acquiring and shedding the variants? In fact, why didn’t it occur to the leading lights in infectious disease, epidemiology, and public health that Covid would spin-off variants? Or did it occur to them but the information was suppressed? Many elites are more invested in narratives than truth.
Elites and media are trying to memory-hole that they pitched vaccines as silver bullets. Covid vaccines are experimental. Vaccines may well have utility, but they’ve been oversold. But, hey, Big Pharma is making a bundle off jabs, regardless of faltering efficacy. Big Pharma spreads money around, too. Politicians in both parties get healthy contributions. And elites just can’t be wrong; they’re too smart to be wrong.
The conceit that fuels this debacle can’t be overemphasized. Certainly, there’s plenty of greed and political opportunism that’s fueling suspect public health policies and harmful government edicts and profligacy. But those are subsets and they’re possible because elites are given over to exaggerated estimates of their powers.
This crème de la crème is persuaded that their educations, credentials, affluence, and statuses make them gods, of sorts. They’re the most sophisticated, knowledgeable, and capable assemblage in history, they believe. How about Tony Fauci’s “I am science” declaration? That idiocy typifies the thinking of the ilk that Fauci runs with. Such vanity isn’t only found in the medical, public health, and scientific communities, but in government, corporate suites, academia, nonprofits, social media outfits, and, as always, the establishment media. Hubris, not Covid, presents the greater existential threat to America.
How badly misled have we been by elites?
In 2020, Biden’s cynical campaign, equally cynical Democrats, and media propagandists daily browbeat Donald Trump for not defeating the virus. Plenty of people, driven by fear, not reason, bought this demagoguery. Right. Defeat the virus – a highly transmissible upper respiratory infection akin to the common cold.
Covid, a novel virus, no less, in that it’s reasonably certain to have been engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, underwritten indirectly with monies controlled by Fauci, likely released through a blunder, but then weaponized by Xi Jinping because attempts at early containment (a longshot but public health’s best chance) meant that only China would suffer the consequences. Communists, like progressives, don’t let crises go to waste.
But where’s the American establishment in calling out Xi and his Leninist party for loosing this deadly virus on the world? Too many of them are making too much money off the PRC. Others are cowards. Still others regard the PRC as a model for the U.S. And reputations, like Fauci’s, are on the line. To date, an estimated 5.4 million deaths globally from or with Covid (actual deaths are disputable). Nonetheless, millions have died. But Xi’s crime against humanity gets a pass.
Two years-plus after the pandemic began, the spread of delta and omicron proves the elite’s impotence. Yet, like Biden, they drone on. They push the same ineffective protocols and policies. They insist on vax mandates. Like Biden, they scapegoat the unvaccinated. They defy facts and demand open-ended compliance from us… obedience from us… and, finally, really, servility.
Whatever happened to real science? Science that was guided by discovery, facts, and hard realities? Real science is about open inquiry, trial and error, debate, and dissent. Science undertaken with integrity engenders humility. Humility – a healthy sense of limits – is requisite not only in science, but in public health and in the practice of government – at least government that respects rights, is civil, and truly public-spirited.
The Great Barrington Declaration attests to the existence of “medical and public health scientists” and “medical practitioners” dedicated to the pursuit of science as intended: 61,468 strong across the planet. Conscientious men and women, thorough professionals, who’ve courageously stood up to propose and support constructive alternatives to failed Covid public health policies pressed on Americans and others across the globe.
Many of the declaration’s professional signers have been subject to attacks, particularly the founders, Doctors Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya. Francis Collins (now retired NIH head) and Tony Fauci, who’s more ubiquitous than Covid, went after them early on.
Wrote Bhattacharya and Kulldorff for the Brownstone Institute, January 2:
Collins and Fauci played critical roles in designing and advocating for the pandemic lockdown strategy adopted by the United States and many other countries. In emails written four days after the Great Barrington Declaration and disclosed recently after a FOIA request, it was revealed that the two conspired to undermine the Declaration. Rather than engaging in scientific discourse, they authorized “a quick and devastating published takedown” of this proposal, which they characterized as by “three fringe epidemiologists” from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.
If we fail to learn the right lessons from the Covid debacle, we’re bound to repeat them. We must never again let fear triumph over reason. We mustn’t yield broad powers over our lives to politicians, bureaucrats, and experts, who are as fallible as any human beings.
If you don’t think hubristic elites are capable of even greater overreach, capable of imposing a bigger scope of ruinous policies, worse governance, and disaster on an historic scale, we’d like you to meet yet another conceit, “manmade” climate change.
J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith and occasionally on Parler, again @JRobertSmith. He also blogs at Flyover.
