ABC News reports, “Health authorities around the U.S. are increasingly taking the extraordinary step of allowing nurses and other workers infected with the coronavirus to stay on the job if they have mild symptoms or none at all.

The move is a reaction to the severe hospital staffing shortages and crushing caseloads that the omicron variant is causing.

So you can still work in a hospital if you have active COVID but doctors and nurses who don’t have COVID and are unvaccinated are fired. Am I the only one who perceives the absurdity of this scenario?https://t.co/8vHumvcYoo

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 11, 2022

California health authorities announced over the weekend that hospital staff members who test positive but are symptom-free can continue working. Some hospitals in Rhode Island and Arizona have likewise told employees they can stay on the job if they have no symptoms or just mild ones.

The highly contagious omicron variant has sent new cases of COVID-19 exploding to over 700,000 a day in the U.S. on average, obliterating the record set a year ago. The number of Americans in the hospital with the virus is running at about 110,000, just short of the peak of 124,000 last January.

Many hospitals are not only swamped with cases but severely shorthanded because of so many employees out with COVID-19.

At the same time, omicron appears to be causing milder illness than the delta variant.”

Read the entire story.

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Reason’s JD Tucille writes, “It’s no secret that governments worldwide are increasingly hostile to scrutiny of their conduct. But, at a moment when too many media outlets see their role as working with the state to reinforce official narratives, one advocate of press freedom reminds us that the struggle isn’t over the ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ called out by opportunistic politicians, it’s over control of information. Will people be free in the future to decide for themselves what’s truth and what’s BS? Or will we be spoon-fed whatever the powers-that-be endorse?

‘Governments realize that they are in an existential battle over who controls information, who controls the narrative, and they are waging a frontal assault against independent journalism around the world,’ Joel Simon, the exiting head of the Committee to Protects Journalists (CPJ), told CNN’s Brian Stelter…

Governments are in no position to save us from bad information because they’re a major source of the stuff themselves and, if allowed, can use force to impose their versions of reality on dissenters. https://t.co/KJtiWMOrHr via @reason

— J.D. Tuccille (@JD_Tuccille) January 10, 2022

Free societies recognize that it’s a lot more dangerous to let government officials designate what constitutes capital-T Truth than it is to respect people’s rights to decide for themselves. When officialdom makes the call, legitimate news outlets get called ‘fake,’ as former President Trump often smeared his critics, extremists get conflated with opponents of school policies, as the Justice Department did last fall, and claims that COVID-19 originated in a lab leak in China are suppressed as conspiracy theories before later earning respectful treatment.

Truthful information doesn’t require a government seal of approval because government officials are as flawed and biased as anybody else.”

Read the entire column.

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