By Justin Hart
180° from the exasperating media reports and knee-jerk reactions across the world and here in the U.S. — the word on the ground from South Africa is telling a very different tale.
From our esteemed colleague Dr. Andrew Bostom:
Dr. Coetzee, Chair of S. African Med Soc & active practitioner, caring for C19 omicron patients: “No one here in South Africa is known to have been hospitalized with the Omicron variant, nor is anyone here believed to have fallen seriously ill with it.” – link
“If, as some evidence suggests, Omicron turns out to be a fast-spreading virus with mostly mild symptoms for the majority of the people who catch it, that would be a useful step on the road to herd immunity. we’re not – at least for now – treating patients who are severely ill. Take my first Omicron case…It didn’t occur to him that he had Covid: he thought he’d had too much sun after working outside. After he tested positive, so did his wife and four-month-old baby.”
“So far, the patients who’ve tested positive for Omicron here have been mainly young men – a mixture of vaccinated & unvaccinated (though, in our statistics, ‘unvaccinated’ can also mean ‘single-vaccinated’). Only yesterday, I saw 5 more patients…all had a very mild illness.”