It's an observation made before, but it bears repeating

Panicked would-be COVID victims line uo for hours to find out if they’re sick

Pity the poor patient who is suffering with serious symptoms and needs to obtain a COVID test — in some cases, where early intervention would be indicated as a matter of life or death; in others, as a precondition of an urgently-needed procedure. Weep for the worker whose employer requires he be tested regularly, or else risk losing paid hours or outright termination. Cry for the caregiver who already takes time out of her day to tend to someone too weak to care for himself, and who must now spend additional hours waiting in interminable lines for that crucial nasal swabbing.

Now, imagine, if you will, a devastating pandemic of a variant so virulent that victims don’t even know they have it unless they obtain a positive test. This twilit nightmare is reality for the COVID-panicked, a new kind of Karen who has turned her controlling tendencies inward and will do everything in her power to make sure she herself never, ever spreads the dread disease. And therefore, it is crucially important that she gets tested … no matter what.

This mindset is not necessarily the fault of the COVID-panicked individual. The “experts” they’ve been told to trust, from the White House on down to the local news, are terrorizing them with lurid predictions of doom if they are unfortunate enough to contract the dread disease.

Added to the panicked individual’s certainty that a case of COVID is a death sentence is the establishment push for ever more testing. Mandates force increased testing on people who are trying to travel, work, eat, shop, or attend school — just live their lives, in other words. Federal and state governments are also ramping up COVID testing … just because. And in an utterly predictable (intentional?) vicious cycle, more testing equals more reported cases, which equals more panic, which equals more testing …

The combination of unfettered fear with the establishment push to get tested because “it’s the right thing to do” has created a nightmare scenario for people who have a legitimate need for the diagnostic procedure, as testing center lines grow. And grow. And grow. …

Lost in the hysteria is the fact that the omicron variant is turning out to be less virulent than its predecessors. Obviously, anyone with medical complications should avoid infection, but I’ve also heard more than one person refer to omicron as “nature’s vaccine.” It seems counter-intuitive to drive massively increased testing — and predictable spikes in case counts — rather than focus on actual illness, in the face a virus that appears to be following the natural course of mutating to be more transmissible but less dangerous. But nonetheless, that is the course our betters are charting for us.

“We have people overcrowding the emergency room and our testing sites, just because they’re scared,” a technician in a large northeastern healthcare system told me. “But meanwhile, they’ll wait in lines or packed waiting rooms next to people who actually have COVID, exposing themselves as well as adding to the overcrowding and stress in the system.”

It’s not “counter-intuitive” to issue 500 million tests to healthy people if your goal is to keep your sheep panicked and under control.