Photo credit: Chris Bethell
Welcome to Worst Hot Take of the Week – a column in which @MULLET_FAN_NEO crowns the wildest hot take of the week.
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We have found ourselves in the midst of a remorseless virus sweeping throughout Britain (no, not Toryism!), and the lives of the public are undergoing a fundamental reshaping beyond anything the country has experienced since – and I hate to bring this up because of how much Boomers enjoy comparing their lives to it but in this case it's true – the war. So in this time of significant importance, you would hope that our national broadcaster would be providing impartial scrutiny of the government’s handling of the pandemic, but you’d be massively mistaken for a cunt for doing so.As the fatality toll rises daily, BBC News tweeted on Thursday that while the news of “more and more deaths is worrying for people across the UK”, it's also important to break down the data to see what “the figures really tell us”.Deciding not to use their world-class resources to scrutinise “the figures” behind a how a super-consortium of multi-billion pound businesses have only produced 30 new ventilators this week for the NHS, the thread instead critiqued the significance of the COVID-19 fatality toll.“Deaths being reported daily are hospital cases where a person dies with the coronavirus infection,” they write. Yes. Fair. An important fact to acknowledge. Sadly, they then went on to ponder, like Carrie Bradshaw chewing on the end of a pen: “But is the virus causing the death? It could be the major cause, a contributory factor or simply present when they die of something else.”
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At this point they should just fully immerse themselves and start asking the really big questions, like “is the moon causing the coronavirus to spread?" This nihilistic outlook of a virus decimating the population as only “delaying the inevitability of death” sounds like it was taken from some cunt with a Mudvayne tattoo’s MySpace page in 2004.Is it too much to ask our publicly funded broadcaster to stop underplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus with cold, detached statistics by insinuating that the daily rising numbers of fatalities are made up of people who “would have died anyway”? Personally, I don’t think having an underlying health condition should automatically qualify you for premature death, but I must have missed the government announcement where asthma shifted from being something that stopped that ginger kid in your PE class taking part in orienteering to it making them an “expected fatality”.Not to mention how irritating it is to see technocrats trivialising 20,000 deaths that are yet to even happen as if there isn’t a significant value between dying two weeks, six months months or three years from now. Social statistics are worthless in a human context, and that’s the thing about humans – whether they have underlying health conditions or not, they tend to want to live, and so do their families and friends. I mean, SPOILER ALERT: we're all going to die some day, you daft cunts.
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