The prospects for college sports this fall are dire. And we’re getting to the point where the question shifts to whether it’s ethical to try to have them.
First, testing. The one of the main reasons why the Big Ten and Pac-12 decided to go to conference play only this fall is because it ensures a certain level of testing within their respective leagues. They didn’t explicitly say that, but it’s an obvious part of their statements about ensuring health and safety.
Thing is, there are places that are having problems right now with getting tests run in a timely fashion. Florida is one of those places. I know someone who got tested last Monday and was promised a 72-hour return window on the result. After double that time, the verdict still had not arrived.
You can’t do sports if the tests aren’t coming back quickly. They will need to be run as close to games as the turnaround time allows, and then the results actually do have to get there on time. That kind of expedited testing just isn’t possible in some areas, and if it is, it probably should be used for the most vulnerable and frontline health care workers rather than college athletes.
Second, we’re still learning about the longterm effects of the virus. So much attention is being given to the immediate issue of spread that there isn’t a lot left over for follow up studies, but a few are being done.
One such follow up was a study of symptomatic Italian COVID-19 sufferers. After 60 days, only 12% of them had recovered fully back to health. An additional 32% of them reported their quality of life having declined.
Now, a single study of 179 Italians is not enough to make society-level decisions on. It is, however, another piece of evidence on the pile that there can be some serious lingering effects of the disease beyond the two-to-six weeks that the CDC says is common. Another one from last week was from University College London describing neurological complications. We’ve known for a while that COVID-19 has a neurological component; the loss of taste and/or smell has long been known to be an early warning sign that someone has contracted the disease. That the virus might have more persistent neurological effects therefore isn’t a surprise.
Youth isn’t necessarily a defense either. About one in five campers and counselors at a YMCA summer camp in northern Georgia contracted the disease. The campers were no older than 14, and the staffers were no older than 22. And even if those children and young adults aren’t in dire straits, they easily could pass the disease on to older family members.
(Here I will voluntarily add the disclaimer that the opinions expressed in this newsletter are my own and may not necessarily represent those of Gator Country or its other writers.)
When it comes down to it, the United States as a whole has not yet done enough to restart schools and their associated sports to any normal degree.
The response from the federal government has been inadequate, leaving too much up to individual states and creating 50 different responses of varying quality instead of a single, unified, and effective one. And even among the folks in Congress who’ve passed aid and want to do it again, relatively few of the dollars spent and proposed are actually allocated to fighting the virus.
Governors of all stripes rushed to reopen segments of the economy, especially highly visible things like restaurants and hair salons. The latter probably are okay to have open provided all inside wear masks, but you can’t eat while wearing a mask. That rush has led to rising cases in states from coast to coast, putting the prospect of reopening schools in serious jeopardy.
It’s a tactical blunder that’s obvious in hindsight. You can keep shuttered businesses alive by cutting them checks. You can’t replace the social and intellectual development that students get at in-person school by cutting checks. There’s no full replacement for in-person school, especially for the youngest kids, but now we’re in a place where it’s not really safe for the teachers and staff to make that happen.
Senator Marco Rubio said last week that “large Florida hospital systems informed me today their models anticipate now hitting peak of current the first week of August”. I hope those models are right that the peak is that close. I don’t know which systems those are or what goes into their models, but it does fit with the experience of other states. The big rises and falls in the early states took two-and-a-half to three months. As Florida’s big rise began in mid-June, the halfway point of a three-month cycle would be the beginning of August.
But the thing is, there has to be a mechanism for suppressing the virus. There is no rule of nature that it will follow a three-month pattern. It will only peak once the measures of suppression are equal in force to the vectors of spread.
Everything I read in local Florida news outlets and hear from my family that lives in Florida suggests that there isn’t an all-out effort for suppression going on. All-out effort is what it took up here in the northeast where I live (the Navy assigned my wife to Rhode Island).
It’s awful. You really do have to stay home pretty much all the time unless you’re in a sparsely attended public park. You have to be as quick as possible when going in and out of essential stores. You really do have to wear a mask everywhere and, if your job requires you to be out of your home, wash and sanitize your hands until you destroy your skin. You get bored and restless, and your brain comes up with a thousand reasons why it’s okay to go do something just this once because it probably doesn’t matter and you’ve been so good for so long. And then you have to expend effort to push that aside because everyone doing everything they can means everyone doing everything they can.
But we did it up here. My wife and I did with a toddler, even. Rhode Island’s population of approximately one million people is getting fewer than 100 cases a day with test positivity rates below three percent. It’s been that way for a few weeks now. As of the end of last week, there were 61 total COVID-19 hospitalizations in the entire state.
We now can enjoy the fruits of the success, which include greater freedom of mobility and vastly more peace of mind. Summer camps are safely happening right now, and schools are on track to open on time as normal.
It is possible to get the virus way down, but again, it takes months of hard effort doing things you don’t like doing. And then, even as some restrictions relax, you still have to stay vigilant on mask wearing, distancing, and hand washing. I don’t see that effort happening in all that many states from afar.
Maybe I’m just missing it. I hope I am. I hope what I see is a drastically inaccurate picture.
But until states put in the all-out effort consistently for months, there won’t be a good way to fully reopen in-person schools. And if that’s not doable, school-related sports probably shouldn’t be happening either.