A hospital in Seattle has come face-to-face with the unexpected consequences of masking little children, and it is sending the hospital into a panic in trying to address the issue.
Seattle Children’s Hospital has found a startling number of people flooding its emergency room as the normal fall flu season begins to kick in, according to Seattle’s KING-TV.
Seattle Children’s Emergency Medicine Medical Director Dr. Tony Woodward raised the alarm, telling the station that the hospital’s emergency room is overflowing with people facing the usual number of winter viruses aside from COVID-19 and its variants.
Children are coming in from all over the area after being exposed to the viruses that they had not been exposed to when schools were closed and they were forced to wear masks everywhere, Woodward said.
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“Many kids have worn masks in school during the pandemic. But now that the mask mandates have been lifted, kids [are] getting sicker. That’s in addition to the fact that local pediatric beds are full in most hospitals. That means most patients are now going to the ER instead,” KING-TV reported.
The flood of patients in Seattle should have been an easy one to project, especially after the Biden administration continued its anti-science recommendations, despite the many doctors advising an end to strict COVID policies. After all, numerous studies have shown that children are at a much lower risk of contracting or spreading the coronavirus.
Other studies even showed that mask use had little effect at all on stopping the transmission of the coronavirus. And more even claimed that wearing a mask is more dangerous than not wearing one at all, especially with all the toxins they accumulate.
Consequently, top medical authorities have been warning for some time that schools should dump their masking policies.
Woodward warned that this problem will only get worse in Seattle as we move deeper into the fall flu season. He also said that his hospital has taken extraordinary measures to address the growing problem.
“We’ve converted a storage room into patient care space; we have a tent. We see patients in a tent,” Woodward told the station. “It’s dissatisfying for everyone; for the staff, for the physicians, for the families to be seen in these ancillary spaces, but that’s the only way we can do it because we don’t have enough physical beds.”
The hospital stressed on its website that ER visits are not for non-emergency injuries, and parents should make appointments with their primary care physicians for those issues.
The website also maintains a list of issues that should be treated in the ER as opposed to the issues that should be treated by a family doctor or urgent care.
Authorities also note that the ER and urgent care do not provide well-child checkups, sports physicals or return-to-play evaluations after a concussion.
The end of masking in schools is a long time coming. Even as early as January, top doctors were urging states to eliminate school masking policies.
One problem many schools face, though, is the stubborn refusal to listen to the science, as exhibited by the nation’s powerful teachers’ unions, many of which outrageously claimed that closing schools and masking kids were “safer” for teachers.
And even after the CDC and other authorities started saying that schools should be open for in-class learning, many teachers’ unions were lobbying for just the opposite, the New York Times reported early this year.
Many woke administrators are also to blame. It has gotten so bad that in August, one California principal called the cops on a little boy who refused to wear a mask in school. The principal wanted the 4-year-old barred from school over his masking transgression.
With all this, it is clear that it is long past time for America to get past this obsession with masks. It seems like they have done more harm than good.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.