(Wood House) – Repeat after me: New York City’s emergency rooms were not overwhelmed by visits in spring 2020. In fact, they were busier during the 2017–2018 flu season than they were at any point between lockdown orders and January 2022’s supposed omicron surge.
Data from the New York City Department of Health and Hygiene, provided via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, tell a different story from the one told by elected officials, news media, dancing nurses, and aspiring celebrity doctors.
Contrary to the mainstream narrative, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s stay-at-home orders didn’t come “just in time” to save New York City’s healthcare system from collapse. They triggered a staggering 60 percent-plus decline in the number of people coming or being brought to ERs. That’s a hard truth to handle given the city’s record high number of EMS calls and hospital, outpatient facility, and emergency room deaths in spring 2020.
It’s likewise a hard, if predictable, truth to handle for those of us who were (and are) anti-lockdown.
We remember how selected images and videos from NYC hospitals were used to scare people across the country about how dangerous COVID must be. We remember being told, implicitly if not explicitly, that in order to avoid what was happening in New York, we must be content with Zoom church, screen school, carryout meals, and minimal in-person contact with humans outside our own household.
We remember that anyone who questioned the wisdom of these directives – or wondered whether NYC hospitals were truly any busier than during a bad flu season – was a grandma killer. Meanwhile, grandma was being killed by the very policies and protocols put in place to “save hospitals” and “slow the spread,” not only in the hospital and at the long-term care facility, but also at home.
No one denies thousands of New Yorkers died needlessly between March and May 2020. Now we know it wasn’t because the city’s ERs were overrun.
I’ll continue to pursue and publish data related to the NYC Spring 2020 mortality event, toward trying to help make sense of what happened, how, and why.
See the New York City section of Substack for a post that chronicles all posts on this topic.
Reprinted with permission from Wood House.