Photo: Denis Moskvinov / Alamy Stock Photo
Welcome to Worst Hot Take of the Week – a column in which @MULLET_FAN_NEO crowns the wildest hot take of the week.
Reasonable take: Seems fair.
Brain-rot: "Somebody call Esther Rantzen, my child is going to be forced into wearing PPE!" – Allison Pearson.As most of us suffer a disorientating cabin fever, the lockdown lifestyles of British columnists seem to flitter between hating the presence of their families and bemoaning that the working classes aren't risking their lives to wash their husband's dirty socks or "educate their children" (code for "get these fucking kids out of my workspace").
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Is it really "child abuse" to gently explain that the face masks children have inevitably encountered months into a pandemic are merely there to protect them? It appears so!Playing devil's advocate, though: a reasonable person might argue that the first section of society allowed to congregate freely should protect themselves and others. It's also probably desirable to have a better understanding of how children can spread the virus before deciding to unleash them back into the wilderness.When Pearson's statements were challenged by someone claiming to be a consultant paediatrician, who had personally treated COVID cases in children, Pearson responded with the assertion that diagnoses in children are "vanishingly rare" – as if it was a gotcha moment and children accounting for "between 1 percent and 5 percent" of cases means they are "immune" and don't "transmit" the virus.Not to be a pedantic cunt of linguistics or maths or whatever the fuck, but you would hope that an established journalist at a national newspaper could grasp the astonishingly large difference between something being "rare" and something being "scientifically impossible". Shiny Charizards are "rare". Our hopes of going to be pub this summer are "rare". But my god, I'd happily be a dead corpse in the ground if those were an "impossibility".
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