This week, the U.S. has fully vaccinated 44.4% of its population, or 146 million Americans. COVID cases are also slowly but surely dwindling down as states safely reopen businesses and schools. So now that the Democrat-led U.S. government is seeing the drop in COVID cases, they are shifting to colds and flu to control people even after the pandemic, a new report suggests.
Red State pointed out that COVID grifters are scampering to find the next big illness to keep people "masked and locked down." And it appears that they have found it in the form of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, which is defined by CDC as "a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms" and "the most common cause of bronchiolitis, (inflammation of the small airways in the lung) and pneumonia (infection of the lungs)" among children a year old and younger.
Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist, took to Twitter to warn the public that RSV is a "cold-like respiratory illness that produces symptoms similar to COVID" that could "cause severe illness in older adults and young children." He claims that RSV "disappeared for a year" because of COVID safety precautions such as mask-wearing and cites the lifting of mask mandates as the reason why RSV has spread in the southern states.
As a contrast to COVID that places the elderly in higher risk of severe illness, RSV places toddlers and infants at risk. FOX13 reported that from May 23 to June 5, the Florida Department of Health reported up to seven outbreaks of RSV in childcare facilities all over the state, all of which had a high percentage of children testing positive for the virus. St. Joseph's Children's Hospital pediatric pulmonologist Dr. John Prpich said that the 35% rate is unusually high for this season, as RSV is more common during Fall and Winter.
So is there really a reason for the feds to emphasize RSV now that COVID is manageable? According to Forbes, not really. It's simply worth noting how authorities focused on COVID while other concerns such as the flu were largely ignored.
The statistics on RSV are as follows: every year, there are about 58,000 hospitalizations caused by RSV. About 100 to 500 children aged five and below die from the disease. For those aged 65 or older, RSV causes about 177,000 hospitalizations and 14,000 deaths.
Like COVID, RSV commonly spreads through respiratory droplets from the mouth or nose that come out when one coughs, sneezes, or breathes. Another is contaminated surfaces. The similarities to COVID is why COVID precautions are applicable as RSV precautions. However, the report points out that RSV is "not a novel virus and is "not going to cause a pandemic this year."
However, there may still be a subset of people who will be as worried about RSV as they are over COVID. The Atlantic reported in May that for some people, "diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity-even when that means overestimating the disease's risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit," and these people are "very liberal" Democrats.
Freedom-loving people, particularly those who don't like masks and those who waited for any declaration about the flu during the pandemic but couldn't find any, should expect these "very liberal" people to be the first to sound the alarm on RSV and overestimate its severity, like how some officials like Anthony Fauci and mainstream media like CNN did with COVID.
