On CNN’s Reliable Sources last night, Brian Stelter experienced a brief, uncharacteristically reasonable moment of sanity. “With this inevitability about more and more and more cases, what’s the better metric to be using?,” he mused, before going on to suggest that “symptomatic” cases would be a better way to “evaluate the fight against COVID.” And then:

We collectively took action to protect the elderly from Covid. Now, shouldn’t we be doing more to protect children by letting them live normal lives? Are we really going to let the kids suffer even more? And are the facts about COVID getting through to the people who need to hear them?

Is this a weird, Covid-era rerun of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? I’m glad Stelter is coming around to something approximating rationality, although it is something of an out-of-body experience to hear someone who complained that Fox News hosts weren’t posting vaccine selfies to suddenly position himself as a hard-nosed Covid realist. Still, he’s right: We do need to make sure that “the facts about COVID” are “getting through to the people who need to hear them.” Including the people on his television network.