Media Whines About New Study Finding Omicron Hard to Distinguish From Common Cold

Mike Miller reporting for RedState

News flash: I’m as tired of writing about COVID-19 and the Omicron variant as you are of reading about it. But here’s the thing. Turns out, there’s a legitimate reason to panic over Omicron. On the left, that is. Based on the results of a new study, it’s hard for people with Omicron to distinguish it from a common cold.

Let’s first back up the bus.

As my colleague Scott Hounsell reported on Friday, a recent Danish study suggests Moderna’s mRNA COVID vaccine actually increases the probability of contracting the Omicron variant after 90 days — a devastating body blow to the narrative of fearmongering liberals everywhere. Turns out, it’s even worse.

According to a COVID symptom study (using the ZOE COVID-19 symptoms app) created by doctors and scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, King’s College London, and Stanford University School of Medicine, if you or someone you know has a cold right now, chances are it’s COVID-19. Again, Biden and the Democrats, hardest hit.

Even Business Insider, no doubt devastated, reported the bad news.

New data from the Zoe symptom-tracker app suggests one in two people with new coldlike symptoms will have COVID-19 rather than the common cold. [While] scientists are still racing to find out whether the Omicron variant, which is quickly spreading in several countries including the UK, US, Denmark, and South Africa, [it] does indeed cause milder illness than Delta.

Business Insider noted that people who reported symptoms on the Zoe app were less likely to have five or more symptoms than those with Delta.

Epidemiologist Tim Spector, the study’s lead author, said in a press release on Thursday (emphasis, mine:

ZOE data clearly shows that the most important symptoms are no longer, a new continuous cough, a high temperature or loss of taste or smell. For most people, an Omicron-positive case will feel much more like the common cold, starting with a sore throat, runny nose and a headache. You only need to ask a friend who has recently tested positive to find this out.

This “terrible” news apparently panicked the epidemiologist, who instead of thinking through the meaning and logic of the study result — that most Omicron-positive people only experience mild, cold-like symptoms — instead toggled to this:

We need to change public messaging urgently to save lives as half of people with cold-like symptoms now have COVID.

Hold the bus. Change the messaging? Why? Because fear tactic crap like Biden’s warning of a “winter of severe illness and death” wasn’t scary enough, or because the silly hyperbolic warning didn’t come anywhere even close to tracking with reality, so the majority of Americans just ignored it?

Seems to me if mild cold symptoms are all most Omicron-positive people experience, and assuming that people they might pass the virus to would in turn only experience similar symptoms, why the hyperbolic concern? Why Biden’s ridiculous warning of “a winter of severe illness and death”?

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the study results are applicable to kids, as well.

U.S. doctors interviewed this week said that while they are seeing record positive results from children’s c-virus tests, the vast majority of cases so far have been mild & look a lot like the common cold.

Yet, the Wall Street Journal headline reads:

Omicron and children: Pediatric hospitals in parts of U.S. filling fast.

Meanwhile, over at The Most Trusted Name in News™, CNN warns: Omicron is spreading fast. That’s alarming even if it’s mild.

The Omicron variant of coronavirus is spreading quickly in several countries where it has been discovered. Even if it causes only mild disease — and that’s far from certain [Nonsense, it’s totally certain] — that could still mean many people end up in the hospital and dying.

It’s killed at least one person in the UK [You’re kidding. A whole one?] and put 10 [Ten?] into the hospital — most of them vaccinated, according to government authorities.

And of course, CNN is oblivious to how ridiculous that was.

Then we have Politico: Mild Omicron could still be bad.

The early indications suggest that the Omicron variant of the coronavirus typically causes disease that is “mild.” But even if that turns out to be true, “mild” doesn’t mean “no big deal.”

Mild Covid-19 can still cause a whole lot of illness, a whole lot of economic disruption, a whole lot of strain on health care systems around the world. In the U.S., the big Omicron wave could hit in January when we could also be wrestling with a travel-propelled post-Christmas Delta surge. Plus maybe the flu.

Dr. Doom, Anthony Fauci continues off the charts, as evidenced by the following two headlines last week, the first from Deseret News, the second from NBC News.

Dr. Fauci issues new warning over the omicron variant

Fauci warns omicron variant is ‘raging through the world’

And of course, Biden’s ridiculous “winter of severe illness and death” warning takes home the grand prize.

So, that’s it. I’m going to bow out of the COVID, Omicron, vaccine, et al. dialogue. At least until or if something yuuge comes down the pike.

Otherwise, I’m over it.