January 13, 2022

We are now officially entering the third year of the Wuhan surprise. We are experiencing a brand-new SARS co-V2 variant, Omicron, which is sweeping through the population like a lot of nasty winter respiratory infections. Except that we test for it. And we know its name.

As of early January, the Omicron makes up roughly 95% of cases in the Northeast (CDC data). In my state of Pennsylvania, for instance, our peak case numbers were triple what they were last December. Our hospital, and ICU occupancy so far however is slightly lower than last year, attesting to the more benign nature of this particular bug.

I was looking through the hospitalization data on the Johns Hopkins site.  As a former critical care specialist, two things are curious to me. Number one is that the total number of ICU beds in the country has fallen from 91,000 in January 2021 to 80,000 now. I’m sure that a portion of that decrease is due to acute illness of ICU personnel, given Omicron’s infectivity, and vaccine avoidance. I do wonder, however, how many of those beds were lost due to the firing of ICU staff due to their vaccine status.

The second strange data point is that in the U.S. as a whole or Pennsylvania in particular, there are said to be roughly 20% of ICU beds unoccupied. In my experience over the years, intensive care units tend to be full, and we accept new admissions only by transferring out the least ill. If I was running a 20 bed ICU and had four open beds, I’d be feeling pretty comfortable. Maybe this data is wrong, but if it’s not, this is hardly a crisis.

As of January 2022, a majority of the population has been coerced into multiple inoculations, with spike protein-producing mRNA. Despite this, we are seeing record COVID numbers. How could this be?

Data from Britain suggest that roughly 50% of coronavirus patients in the hospital, were admitted for something else. In the United States, those numbers fall between 30% and 60% depending on the locale. In our hospital, there has been an obvious reduction in acuity for patients that carry the COVID diagnosis, given the benign characteristics of Omicron.

It has become rather clear that natural immunity and/or vaccination/booster status are irrelevant in the current surge. In fact, in the case of vaccination, there is data from Iceland and Denmark suggesting that the population most prone to Omicron are those who have had the full original course of the vaccine. Here’s the data from Iceland, where the population is 91% fully vaccinated. If you look at infections per 100,000 people based on vaccine status, the fully vaccinated have the highest prevalence of infection. Now in the same data set, it’s clear that the vaccinated have less severe disease, which we have been saying for some time, but in the case of Omicron, for most people, that point is moot.