Remember when COVID-19 first came to prominence? We would see updates every day on local and national newscasts reporting the number of new cases of the virus, along with death tolls. President Trump and various governors held daily or almost-daily press briefings to talk about the spread of the disease and how they were working to help mitigate it.
And then came the variants. Suddenly we started to become familiar with Greek letters, and we would hear how each variant was different (meaning worse) than the one that came before it. In addition to the broken record of ways we could avoid these new variants — mask up, get vaccinated, don’t live your life — we’d hear the same stats: new cases, seven-day averages, and, unfortunately, deaths.
Now we’re facing omicron. This variant is different from anything we’ve seen. It’s less virulent than other strains by far, yet it spreads quickly. The symptoms of omicron resemble a nasty cold more than they do the variants with stronger symptoms. Omicron may even be more resistant to the vaccines than the variants that came before.
Omicron sort of upends The Narrative™ on COVID, doesn’t it?
So, what do bureaucrats and other leftists who know better than you do when they’re forced to adapt The Narrative™? They move the goalposts, of course.
A new article from The Hill has a telling headline: “Experts say COVID-19 cases don’t tell whole story.” Now the medical experts want us to know that actual cases don’t matter as much as hospitalizations and deaths do.
Oh, and there’s plenty of reminders in this article about the new haves and have-nots: the vaxxed and the unvaxxed.
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Former Planned Parenthood darling Dr. Liana Wen, who has suddenly become the go-to expert on all things medical, says that the new focus on the extremes that result from COVID infections is part of our adjustment to knowing that we’ll always have the virus with us.
“This is the new normal,” said Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University and former Baltimore health commissioner. “This is what we will have to accept as we transition from the emergency of COVID-19 to living with it as part of the new normal.”
The article later quotes her:
“Omicron in a way is the first test of what it means to live with COVID-19,” said Wen. “And by that I mean we are going to see many people getting infected but as long as our hospital systems are not overwhelmed and as long as vaccinated people are generally protected against severe outcomes, that is how we end the pandemic phase and switch into the endemic phase.”
Other experts, including Dr. Anthony “I AM SCIENCE” Fauci, say that measuring hospitalizations and deaths gives us an indication of how severe viral infections are.
In other words, those benchmarks allow public health bureaucrats to know just how much of the sky is falling and how much panic they can stoke.
And then there’s Joe “Great Uniter” Biden. He wants all of us to be prepared for the mass hospitalizations that will surely occur when those great, unwashed, unvaxxed rubes catch omicron and get super sick with the mild variant.
“Because we have so many vaccinated and boosted, we’re not seeing hospitalizations drive as sharply as we did in March of 2020 or even this past fall. America has made progress; things are better,” Biden said on Monday on a White House COVID-19 response team call with the National Governors Association to discuss the administration’s response to the omicron variant.
“But we do know that with rising cases, we still have tens of millions of unvaccinated people and we’re seeing hospitalizations rise,” he added, saying that some hospitals are going to get overrun both in terms of equipment and staff.
So bear in mind when you start to hear less about case numbers and more about hospitalizations and deaths, the panic porn crowd wants you to live in fear, and they want you to look down your nose at the unvaccinated.
They’ll never admit that they were wrong about trying to achieve a COVID-zero scenario, so they’ll modify The Narrative™ to deflect from their failure to reach an unreachable goal.
