Hello and welcome. It is Eric Erickson here across the country from my flagship station,

WSB in Atlanta, Georgia. The phone number is 877-9-97-E-Ric. 877-9-7-3-4-25. We've got the

Omicron, or as Joe Biden says, Omnicron, it's Omicron variant of COVID. It's not something new. It didn't, we didn't

jump from Delta to Omicron. There have been all sorts of variants in between. Some got news like

Lambda. Most of them didn't. But here we are. And I thought who best to talk to about this.

And probably we've had immunologists on an epidemiologist on, but what about the emergency room doctors who were on the front lines of this stuff?

I've got a friend who is an emergency room doctor, got his medical degree at Morehouse College and then did his residency with Emory University.

And now is an emergency room doc in addition to being a Marine in one of the largest

suburban urban areas of the southeast, Gwinnett County, Georgia. That is my friend Rich McCormick,

who was also a candidate for Congress in the seventh last time. Rich, how are you? Good, sir. How are you?

Great. So let me, let's back up before we get into this current

variant Omicron and what you think about it too. The beginning days of COVID, what was it like

to be an emergency room doctor? It's scary times. We, the nursing staff were exposed repeatedly.

We were exposed before even really knew it was in the United

States. People were getting fevers and having all the symptoms of the disease process without

even having a testing process, without having good protective gear, without knowing really how to

treat this disease. This is a whole, when you have a novel virus, not knowing how it affects you how easily it's

spread and what the outcome can be is uh is an alarming thing very stressful thing for the er

uh we it was funny we actually emptied out the er the beginning because nobody wanted to come

to the ER and be exposed to it and we saw a huge amount of amount of just very deadly disease take place, especially

with our vulnerable populations. It was high, high mortality rate with especially those people that

had conditions that made them susceptible to the disease. And along the way as well, I can imagine

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