The Coronavirus pandemic shows no sign of obediently packing its bags and moving on: across the UK, a record 53,135 positive test results were recorded yesterday. One doctor just finishing his A&E shift at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham last night posted a photo of ambulances queuing up to unload their patients, many having waited more than three hours. Essex
has declared a major incident after the latest rise in infections.
Examples such as these should give a clue as to why secondary schools may not reopen next week, or even at all during January. Maybe not until half-term. After all, the Government has to try and keep the population safe, while hoping the vaccine cavalry will appear and work its way through the most vulnerable. Secondary age children may be their very own superspreader group. So a short term school closure is a no brainer.
Except, it seems, for the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker: yesterday’s why-oh-why
Daily Mail front page
has now been backed up by yet another zero research column from the obscenely overpaid Sarah “
Vain” Vine, teased at the top of today’s
Mail front page, and headed “
It’s madness to treat our schools like nail bars or nightclubs”. Eh?
False equivalence, much? She then gets out her king-size onion. “
When we think of the negative effects of lockdown, the first image that springs to mind is that of the lonely pensioner … But for me, as the mother of two children, there’s another image, one I find equally disturbing. That of the lone teenager, cut off from friends, locked in their bedroom”.
Who’s locking them in? Anyhow, what are these teenagers’ thoughts? “
Wondering what the point of all of this is anyway, since exams will probably be cancelled”. They really
will be cancelled if the denial brigade screw things up again. Do go on. “
Worrying that even if you do get a degree, there won’t be any jobs, since lockdown has destroyed the economy”. Three years or more down the road? Bullshit. But, sadly, there is more.
“
No wonder health professionals are reporting an alarming rise in cases of depression and anxiety among teenagers. Only yesterday, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health reported a record number of young people being admitted to hospital with eating disorders brought about by the stress of lockdown … Girls are disproportionately affected, in particular high-achieving students derailed by exam cancellations”.
Sarah Vine has a teenage daughter, doesn’t she? So, moving beyond the obligatory “
The teaching unions want to close for as long as possible for their own political ends”, which is yet more predictable bullshit mandated by the
Mail’s editorial line, maybe we should ask who might be the bad influence precipitating any eating disorder problems.
And we can get a clue from the very next item in Ms Vine’s appallingly tedious column, where she tells “
The other night, faced with yet another evening of execrable terrestrial TV, I started watching Bridgerton on Netflix. Several episodes, a pile of Quality Street wrappers and the best part of a bottle of Chablis later, I was still glued to the action”.
I wonder if, as
Private Eye magazine might ask, the two are in any way related?
I think we should be told.
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6 comments:
Chocolates, wine, Daily Mail - The Breakfast of Champignons.
"...lockdown has destroyed the economy"......Yeah, right.
2008 did that. As did subsequent "austerity" and criminally incompetent and late reaction to the CV19 pandemic. Pre-CV19, all the main economic indicators projected yet another looming disaster. CV19 merely accelerated the process.
No surprise, then, that far right gobshites like Vine are ready to visit death on innocent victims. It's all they've got now apart from the "support" (read: collusion) of shithouses like the Starmer Gang.
About 2022 the full effects of this plus Brexit will haul into view. Maybe it'll be supplemented by yet another war to distract attention. By then Britain will be wallowing in self-created willfully ignorant horror. The only "winners" will be the same "entrepreneurs" and "creators of wealth" who got us into this shit in the first place.
It could all have been so different.
Are all Ms Vine's columns written after the 'best part of a bottle of Chablis'?
“Worrying that even if you do get a degree, there won’t be any jobs, since lockdown has destroyed the economy”.
No, Ms Vine, I think you will find that destruction lies mainly at the feet of Brexit & Brexiters, like your equally unpleasant husband to name but two. As devastating as Covid has been and will continue to be for a while it is the generation of damage that will be caused by leaving the EU that will be the major wrecking ball.
F only your husband was a government minister. Oh...
They can see how successful countries have dealt with the virus, locked down for a few months and now they're coming out the other side, with damage to their economies minimized.
I've suspected for months the Tories wish to prolong the pandemic here in the UK for aslong as possible, PPE contracts, unused Nightingale Hospitals, the profit creamed off to the chums, and goodness knows what else they profiteered from doing the pandemic.
130,000+ dead from their austerity, they couldn't care less if more die, aslong as the multi billion Covid bonanza continues, and for that they need more people infected.
Neither do they care about the peasants kids education, their kids are safe at private schools.
A very special place awaits them all.
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