AUGUST 10, 2020 BY MICHAEL STONE
The Stupid, It Burns: Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt expresses “shock” to learn that children are susceptible to COVID-19.
Daily Beast reports:
Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt learned some disturbing new information on Monday morning: Children can, in fact, contract the coronavirus.
Earhardt, referring to a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which “found that in just the last two weeks of July alone, more than 97,000 tested positive for the virus,” and “nearly 350,000 children have tested positive since the beginning of the pandemic, which as of July 30th accounted for 8.8 percent of total cases,” spoke with Dr. Natashia Kathuria, a Texas Emergency Medicine Physician.
At one point in the discussion the Fox host declared:
97,000 kids have tested positive? That was such a shock to me, because I had heard kids really don’t get it…
The following is a transcript of the entire exchange via Media Matters:
AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): We’re all worried about sending our kids back to school. What is that going to look like for our country, and for our elderly grandparents and things like that? 97,000 kids have tested positive. We all — that was such a shock to me, because I had heard kids really don’t get it, if they do they’re all going to be OK. Do you know any details about that, those — that percentage of kids that did get it? Are they all doing OK, do you have any deaths?
NATASHA KATHURIA (TEXAS EMERGENCY MEDICINE PHYSICIAN): I don’t know about the mortality and morbidity right now in that group. You know, that was just in two weeks, so about 100,000 new cases in pediatric kids just in two weeks. And I can guarantee you that number is actually much higher. We don’t really test kids that often. They’re usually asymptomatic, they have very mild symptoms — but they’re still shedding this virus. So that is going to artificially be low, no matter how good we are about testing right now. So, you know, that’s what we’re worried about right now, is sending these kids to schools and sending them home. And it’s not the kids so much we’re concerned about — obviously, we are — but it’s their grandparents, their parents, when their parents then go to work, who they’re spreading this to.
EARHARDT: Yeah, right, we’re just going to have to be extremely careful, because we all — most of Americans want the kids back in school, but we want to do it safely. But it is true, though, that when the kids get it, they don’t have the — you said, it’s just minimal side effects, right? If they even see those at all?
KATHURIA: Well, so that’s the majority of them. So, the likelihood of death and the likelihood of critical illness is lower, but it’s possible. I mean, a seven-year-old just died in Georgia, with no medical problems. We hear about this, and we see it all the time. Kids get sick, they get multisystem inflammatory syndrome from this. They can get ill from this, the likelihood is just lower, so they’re not immune to this, they definitely can fall ill. But the risk obviously is lower than, you know, a parent or a grandparent whose risk is exponentially greater.
Earhardt’s claim that she didn’t know that children get COVID-19 is hard to believe. Either she is a stupendous idiot who never watches or reads the news, or she is a liar.
Perhaps both.
Earlier this month, a 7-year-old Georgia boy with no underlying conditions died from COVID-19 after being forced to attend a church service where two elderly members also contracted the virus and died.
It was national news, but maybe Earhardt missed it.
Bottom line: Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt expresses “shock” to learn that children are susceptible to COVID-19.
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