The leaders of the Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center said severe COVID illness is now non-existent at their hospital, in a town hall meeting last week that has received remarkably little media attention and deserves a lot more.

Brad Spellberg, MD, Chief Medical Officer of LAC+USC Medical Center, said:

The numbers at LAC COVID-positive tests have continued to go up. But this isn’t because we’re seeing a ton of people with symptomatic disease getting admitted. We’re seeing a lot of people with mild disease in urgent care or ED who go home and do not get admitted. Of those who are admitted, they’re 90% of the time not admitted due to COVID. Only 10% of our COVID positive admissions are admitted due to COVID. Virtually none of them go to the ICU….  It is just not the same pandemic as it was, despite all the media hype to the contrary. A lot of people have bad colds, is what we’re seeing.

Paul Holtom, MD, Epidemiologist and Infection Disease Division Service Chief at LAC+USC, added:

Certainly if the experience of our hospital is reflective of across the county, which I believe it is, we’re just seeing nobody with severe COVID disease.  We have no one in the hospital who had pulmonary disease due to COVID. We have 24 people who have tested positive for COVID, but nobody who had COVID-19 disease, as we would see in the past.

Dr. Barbara Ferrer is expected today, based on numbers, to probably announce that LA county will go into a mask mandate situation… But certainly there is no reason from a hospitalization due to COVID perspective, to be worried at this point.

We can only hope other jurisdictions at least check with their hospitals before putting COVID mandates (which are ineffective, anyway) back in place.

We’ve clipped the key three and half minutes of video here: