BEO raves about dateless drivel, ignores big obvious data

Business Eye Online are shouting at the sea with their latest article, “Eye View – Freedon (sic) is a state of mind”.

This is the problem with ignorance.

If we had been working from the data, we’d have been out of lockdown months ago. Instead, we worked in dates and didn’t bother to lock down properly. Photographs of Seapark and Newcastle show that these seaside destinations are packed. And if you don’t know how it works it means that in somewhere like that, with a single infected individual, the R-number (the transmission rate) can leap into the hundreds.

“To say that the business community around here was disappointed by the Executive’s much talked about ‘Pathway Out Of Restrictions’ – to give it its full snappy title – is a bit of understatement.

Except that a three-pack of underpants might just be preferable to the pile of directionless data-driven, dateless drivel that our political leaders served up for our delectation on Tuesday afternoon.

So they’ll be telling us when we can eat, drink and sh*** for the foreseeable. They even laid out, in humourless, tepid prose for their hapless but dutiful citizens what kind of delights they could look forward to.”

But this sort of drivel from a business publication highlights why we will still be living with Coronavirus in 2022. It’s the sort of mentality that would have us open our doors in a zombie apocalypse. It’s the sort of thinking that the bad person, Carter Burke, in James Camerons seminal ALIENS would have espoused. Go on, open the doors, don’t mind the problem, just as long as we have something to look forward to.

With a lack of a byline it’s hard to point the finger, but you have to wonder what mentality would create such a whiny article. The mentality that encourages people to break quarantine, to go ahead and have a house party on a birthday (a date) rather than waiting for covid-exposure results (the data).

At a time when we are desperate, rather than having journalism, we have death-cult prose from a business publication. Don’t pay attention to the dying, get the pubs open. Don’t mind those suffering from long covid, there’s a big steak in Commercial court waiting. Death cult? Is that a little strong? I don’t think so – the worst consumers to have to serve are dead ones. They aren’t great at repeat business.

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