A warrant has been issued for a Houston-area mom accused of putting her son in the trunk of her car after he tested positive for COVID-19. The woman was in line to get a COVID test, authorities said.
Sarah Beam, a teacher at Cypress Falls High School in the Cy-Fair Independent School District, has been charged with endangering a child.
According to court documents, Beam took the 13-year-old boy to a drive-thru COVID testing site at Pridgeon Stadium on Monday, January 3, for additional testing.
A CFISD employee who was gathering information from people in line said Beam told her the boy was in the trunk because she didn’t want to be exposed to the virus.
The employee asked the woman to open the trunk, and she confirmed the boy was there, according to court documents.
She alerted Cy-Fair ISD police and provided the woman’s license plate number and other information used to identify her.
“I have never heard of somebody being put in a trunk because they tested positive for anything,” said Sgt. Richard Standifer with the Texas Department of Public Safety.
All signs indicate that the overwhelming majority of these people are having an experience comparable to their previous run-ins with influenza or the cold. While everyone agrees that it’s better to not be sick at all, this phenomenon is also pushing people to ask whether Omicron is something worth shutting down society over.
For the longest time, fear of COVID-19 was fear of the unknown. So many Canadians said for months on end that they never really knew anyone close to them who had ever had the virus. They were then left to fear the worst.
We knew people who had Covid when this first started and they all breezed through it.
That’s changed. Almost everyone now has second hand if not first hand experience with COVID-19 and is asking, given all the renewed lockdown measures, what all the fuss is about.
Well, here’s the answer: Public health officials are not particularly bothered by the prospects of thousands of people getting mild Omicron. But the Ontario government estimates that Omicron currently has a 0.3% hospitalization rate. This means that when 20,000 people come down with the virus, 60 of them will need a hospital bed.
But do these numbers justify the forced shutdown of society, the closing of our children’s schools, and all of the now documented harms that come with these measures? The percentage of people who are answering yes to that question gets smaller by the day.
It’s become something of a farce to see senior health bureaucrats and executives stand in front of the cameras and brag to us about how after almost two years of this they’re still caught off guard when a few hundred people are admitted to ICU.
If the healthcare system is at risk of collapse based on such numbers, maybe the people running the system have some explaining to do. Talk about a group of people clearly in over their heads.
Canadian taxpayers have collectively poured hundreds of billions of dollars into dealing with COVID-19. It’s not unreasonable for us to in turn expect that these resources be better managed.
Make no mistake about it: Canadians are compassionate people who aren’t about to abandon the idea of pulling out all the stops to protect the vulnerable.
But as more of them have mild Omicron experiences, they’re going to be less accepting of the idea that protecting the vulnerable means restricting everyone else.
Now we know of others who’ve more then likely got Omicron and they are all fine. Like a cold. Completely asymptomatic. Congested.