I'm going to go against the grain here, and I'd appreciate people not judging who I am or who I'm politically aligned with based on my opinion here. All of you would likely be wrong in those judgments.
Let me quote again from Allen Sills, Chief medical officer for the NBA:
āAs long as weāre still in a place where when a single individual tests positive for the virus that you have to quarantine every single person who was in contact with them in any shape, form or fashion, then I donāt think you can begin to think about reopening a team sport. Because weāre going to have positive cases for a very long time.ā
I think this is a pretty extreme position, but it's a position that is likely to carry the day in such a risk-averse culture. That would mean schools, churches, colleges, sports, theaters, concerts, day-care centers, subways, planes, city sidewalks, dine-in restaurants, and anything else with a significant number of people in proximity with each other would need to remain "closed" until a vaccine is tested and manufactured, which most estimates predict in next August (2021), 18 months from this past February, when work began in earnest.
As someone who is in the age range where 95% of the fatalities would occur (according to European data from WHO), I don't want this for my children's and grandchildren's lives. I'm willing to assume the 2-4% risk of dying (likely much lower) to return us to a more normal world.
In 1952, the polio epidemic paralyzed almost 60,000 people and killed over 4000, and would do similar damage until the vaccine arrived in 1956/7. In the 1980s Measles killed almost 100,000 Americans despite available vaccines (it took almost a decade for doctors to realize that a second dose was required in many people). In those eras we were willing to assume the terrible risk for the not insignificant benefit of maintaining a functional country. It's not so much sports, it's what the complete shutdown of community-bonding activities and sustaining activities like church, work, and school will cost us. And that's not even bringing the economic costs into the conversation. There has to be a realistic conversation about costs and benefits.
Life is not zero-risk. 35,000 people are killed yearly on the highways, and we still drive, and we permit driving at 70 mph on the highways. Hundreds of thousands are killed by lung cancer and many of us still smoke, and we permit the sale of cigarettes (which I oppose personally, but we have decided as a country to allow smoking). Alcohol-related disease kills almost 90,000 people in the US annually, yet we still drink and permit the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages (banning alcohol didn't work out too well the first time...).
We need to have a non-political, rational discussion of the costs and benefits of re-opening certain activities. As someone at a much higher risk than most of you younger people on this board (and as someone with a 90-year-old, completely rational father who is at even higher risk who agrees with what I'm about to say), we are willing to bear this risk. A big problem with this discussion is that many in the current climate reflexively either agree or disagree with Trump. Ignore his ideas, and think about what you want personally. I'm pretty aware that I'm tilting at windmills here, but for my own sanity I have to say what I have said in this post. Weigh the costs and benefits, don't insist upon zero risk.
