The San Francisco Gate is doing the work the legacy media refuses to do, as it debunks Governor Gavin Newsom’s crisis mode surrounding COVID. An expose reveals that this latest set of COVID protocols, restrictions, and diktats have nothing to do with any true emergency, and everything to do with maintaining power and bilking the federal government out of more money.

California leads the way… in crisis acting.

The jig is up.

From the San Francisco Gate:

On Saturday, in response to hospitals begging for relief from a massive staffing crisis, the California Department of Public Health announced that most hospitals and skilled nursing facilities can bring COVID-positive and exposed staff back to work without testing or quarantines. The staffers must be asymptomatic, are required to wear N95 masks and are encouraged to work with patients who are already COVID-positive as much as possible.

This news might come as a surprise to people who have been reading dire warnings about omicron and some public health officials’ pleas to cancel plans and stay home. Many public health officials have argued these measures are necessary to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed with COVID patients. Indeed, for the past few weeks, San Francisco hospitals have been in dire straits. But it’s not because people are sick — it’s because of staffing shortages driven by overly strict state quarantine rules, the director of COVID response at UCSF’s emergency department said.

As usual, RedState was ahead of the curve. We have been talking about the risks of staffing shortages produced by state and federal vaccine mandates for many months, and not just about healthcare. From supply chain issues to flight cancellations, many Americans are not having a Happy New Year thanks to misguided and cruel government overreach.

But with the very public mandate threats against healthcare workers in particular, California has taken failed policies to epic proportions, and we are paying the price for it:

After reviewing the charts of every COVID-positive patient at UCSF hospitals on Jan. 4, Dr. Jeanne Noble, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF, determined that 70% of them were in the hospital for other reasons.

“The real COVID crisis that our hospitals are facing is a severe staffing shortage that is compromising the quality of our care,” Noble said Friday, shortly before the policy change was announced.

Staffing shortages are so severe that California is considering canceling elective surgeries, as happened during the worst of last year’s peak.

Elective surgeries, along with the screening that leads to these surgeries, as Los Angeles CBS reports:

With healthcare staff overwhelmed amid this most recent COVID-19 surge, hospitals around the Southland are canceling elective surgeries, everything from joint replacements to gallbladder surgeries this week.

“It’s literally a challenge finding a warm body because there are so many out sick and unavailable to work,” said senior vice president and CSO at Methodist Hospital, Clifford Daniels.

With 100 of its 1800 full-time staff positive for COVID-19, the Arcadia hospital is scrambling to keep up with the never-ending tsunami of patients.

“We have a 26-bed ER here at Methodist hospital and there were I believe something upwards of 90 patients in the ER waiting to be admitted (and) treated,” Daniels said. “The real thing I’ve never seen before… was there were 12 ambulances stacked outside the ER waiting to drop patients off. We had no room. They were just waiting there.”

In need of help, the hospital took a step that many hospitals in Los Angeles County were taking and canceled all elective surgeries, at least 50 operations, in order to free up employees.

Anecdotally, I know of a woman who died in 2021 of pancreatic cancer, which was first diagnosed in mid-2020, when California restored screenings and elective surgeries. Had this woman been screened in early 2020, she might have survived. By the time she was screened, it was too late.

This story is one of thousands, some which have been documented. People who have suffered through pain and discomfort, or whose diseases advanced, because of unelected bureaucrats at the California Department of Health and their shifting COVID policies. Not to mention the “cooked” COVID numbers that Governor Hair Gel still will not discuss; numbers for which the first Director of Health who led the pandemic response, Dr. Sonia Angell, resigned under questionable circumstances. His Hairfulness promptly threw her under the bus.

And now California is looking at repeating this scenario because Hair Gel decided we needed to be “first” in forcing healthcare workers to get the jab, and lead the charge in firing those who refused.

How’s that working out for you, California?

“The crisis from the Omicron peak is not generated by serious COVID illness in regions with highly vaxxed populations,” Noble wrote in an email to SFGATE. “The crisis we are suffering in the Bay Area is largely driven by disruptive COVID policies that encourage asymptomatic testing and subsequent quarantines. … The vast majority of COVID-plus patients I take care of need no medical care and are quickly discharged home with reassurance.”

Yet, these people, driven by the fear inculcated by government, with a heavy assist from the legacy media, are taking away precious resources from people who are truly in health crisis and truly need care.

It would be laughable, if it wasn’t so tragic.

You can thank those “disruptive COVID policies” from Newsom and Co.: Dr. Mark Ghaly, the Crypt Keeper Barbara Ferrer, and the rest of their ilk for creating a real crisis out of a fake one. All for the purpose of holding onto power and collecting those federal COVID dollars.

It’s a self-inflicted wound that should have been averted and avoided. But that would require leadership and actual care and concern for people’s lives.