Putting California's BA.5 Covid "Outbreak" Into Context
From Actual Medical Doctors at the Largest Hospital in Los Angeles
The media in California can’t stop talking about how the state is in the midst of a "severe outbreak" of the “super-infectious” BA.5 Omicron Covid variant.
Nearly ever region of the state is effected, and by some estimates California has more Covid transmission now than ever before. But given all the media fear narratives I wanted to provide information to help put this "outbreak" in context.
What follows are quotes sourced from this video:
Note: here is a backup link of the relevant segment of the video if the original does not work, because as discussed below, it might not be up for long…
This video is a recording of a virtual townhall meeting of the Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center, the largest single provider of healthcare in Los Angeles County. Los Angeles County is a couple weeks behind Northern California in the course of this current "outbreak", but the experience from the hospital is still very emblematic of what the State as a whole is dealing with, and the candidness with which these doctors address the issue is very revealing and gives much needed perspective.
I urge you to watch the entire segment on Covid starting at the 7:39 mark and lasting for approximately 3.5 minutes.
Here are the relevant quotes from the Chief Medical Officer at LAC+USC Med Center:
"Our Covid situation is... just the same, it's not changed, it's been the same, it's like two months of the same."
"The number at LAC+USC Covid, positive tests, has continued to go up, but this isn't because we are seeing a ton of people with symptomatic Covid disease being admitted... it's the same thing. We are seeing a lot of people with mild disease in urgent care or ED who go home and do not get admitted. And of those who are admitted, they're 90% of the time not admitted due to Covid. Only 10% of our Covid positive admissions are admitted due to Covid."
"Virtually none of them go to the ICU. And when they do go to the ICU it is not for pneumonia. They are not intubated, they are not these horrible 100% FIO... we have not seen one of those since February, it's been months!"
"It's just not the same pandemic that it was, despite all the media hype to the contrary"
"A lot of people have bad colds.”
Remember this isn't "Far Right Wing Covid Minimizer Kevin from Placerville" saying this. This is Brad Spellberg, Chief Medical Officer of the largest healthcare provider in LA county saying that for the vast majority of people, BA.5 is at most a bad cold...
Paul Holton, an Epidemiologist at the Hospital adds the following:
"If the experience of our hospital is reflective of across the county, and I believe it is, we are just seeing nobody with severe Covid disease. As of this morning we have no one in the hospital who had pulmonary disease due to Covid. Nobody in the hospital! We have 24 people who have tested positive for Covid , but nobody, nobody who had Covid-19 disease as we would see in the past."
Dr. Holton goes on to comment on the impending return of LA county's indoor mask mandate:
"Dr. Barbara Ferrer (LA County Health Director) is expected to announce today, based on numbers,.. that LA county will go into a mask mandate situation for all indoor and large activities... But certainly, there's no reason, from a hospitalization due to Covid perspective, to be worried at this point."
Recall that this is exactly the rationale being used by LA county, based on the CDC's flawed metrics, to bring back the mask mandate. They are conflating those hospitalized "with Covid" with those hospitalized "due to" Covid, and overreacting to what now appears to be a bad cold.
Well it turns out Los Angeles county department of health was none to happen to see their narrative shattered. The hospital issued the following statement regarding the attention being paying to the townhall video:
They state: "We would like to be very clear: the Covid-19 pandemic remains a very serious public health threat that we must continue to fight with every tool available..."
Be that as it may, they do not refute any claims made in the video and instead reiterate the following:
"At the current time, approximately 10 percent of patients admitted to LAC+USC with a positive Covid test are admitted due to illness caused by Covid. Furthermore, few of the admissions due to symptomatic Covid are admitted to the ICU, and we have not had a patient intubated due to Covid pneumonia for several months."
I think we can judge for ourselves the level of threat we are dealing with based on this information... I added a backup link to the original video if for some reason LAC+USC decides to take it down...
I'm sorry that people are having bad colds. In the before times, a bad cold would not be a news story. A bad cold wouldn’t be a reason for public health officials to start issuing edicts, and it wouldn’t be a reason for the public to drive all over the county to get tested so you might find out what name your bad cold has.
“why are we all playing along in the Kabuki theatre of Covid testing at all?, especially when most of us seem to recognize the complete absurdity of it.”
Regarding one of the rationales still given for Covid testing, that being to allow for treatments such a Paxlovid: While this can be a benefit, it simply is not a rationale for ubiquitous testing. We also have a slew of wonder drugs to treat influenza, and if you are old and frail and present to a hospital with flu-like symptoms, your doctor will test you for flu. That's what we should be doing for Covid as well. We don't ubiquitously test for flu, because it would have not benefit, the same is true for Covid.
Instead, if you are someone who is at risk, basically old and frail, and you have a Covid-like illness your doctor can test you for Covid and treat accordingly. However the ubiquitous testing of everyone with a bad cold regardless of current health status and medical history is a colossal waste.
Specifically regarding Paxlovid: According to the FDA’s EUA factsheet, the clinical study supporting the use of Paxlovid excluded any individuals with a history of Covid infection or vaccination. So for the vast majority of individuals, who have been vaccinated and/or had a prior Covid infection, the benefits of Paxlovid are not currently backed by the clinical study which led to the EUA approval, but simply the assumptions that it might be better than nothing...
In the case of someone who is thrice vaccinated, at least once previously infected and recovered, not elderly, and relatively healthy, there is no evidence supporting the use of Paxlovid at all. Yet this description best decribes the majority of people taking Paxlovid today…
More information can be found in this City Journal article: Biden's Paxlovid Gamble
Based on the experience from LAC+USC, I think there's a strong argument to be made that were it not for ubiquitous Covid testing, this current BA.5 wave might have passed through California without us even noticing it at all. Just as in years past a wave of some disease or another would pass through your town, or your school, or your workplace, with some people getting pretty sick, some even severely...
But without a name attached to the disease, and with no overarching narrative, it would simply fade into the background, and become immemorable as yet another trivial occurrence in life, impossible to recall with any clarity once it had passed.
You might even call it endemic…
Instead we continue to test incessantly for Covid, we track the "cases" of every new "outbreak", which means it is always top of mind, and salient in a way no other "bad cold" has ever been in human history. This is why I believe covid tests are a clear net negative to the general public, and why I wrote last week to question why one would still get tested, and when those who are still testing will stop.
For another perspective, here’s Dr. Viney Prasad arguing in an editorial that it’s Time to break all home Covid tests. He ends the piece by stating:
“Testing is ultimately a ritual. No different than slaughtering a goat to ward off covid. Just with a touch more bio-plausibility, but equally poor empirical validation (aka none).”
Anyway 0 and 2…