Video: According to some, the reality is that sports aren't coming back anytime soon
Right now, our society is in desperate need of hope, any sort of hope.
But is false hope worth it? Because it appears that that is all we are getting these days.
The amount of hope we are receiving with the return of professional and collegiate sports is spreading nearly as much and as fast at the COVID-19 virus does. There have been so many different proposals and start dates that have been thrown around by numerous public figures that it's hard to keep track with all of them.
But according to Sports Illustrated's Stephanie Apstein, she spoke with numerous health experts throughout the country and they're all in agreement that sports aren't coming back anytime soon — but it is worthy to note that none of them were willing to throw out a date of return.
"We will not have sporting events with fans until we have a vaccine," says Zach Binney, a PhD in epidemiology who wrote his dissertation on injuries in the NFL and now teaches at Emory. Barring a medical miracle, the process of developing and widely distributing a vaccine is likely to take 12 to 18 months.
Everyone then wants to talk about playing games in front of empty stadiums with no fans, but even that proves to be an exceptionally tall task. Even if it was guaranteed that those involved weren't subject to others in public, there's always the possibility of someone coughing in the vicinity of someone brining food to the athletes. ... And that's how it spreads.
And we as a country can't risk coming back too early. Just look at South Korea and Japan, which both believed they had the outbreak under control and have since pushed back the start dates of their professional baseball seasons.
“If people just decide to let it burn in most areas and we do lose a couple million people it’d probably be over by the fall,” says Binney. “You’d have football. You’d also have two million dead people. And let’s talk about that number. We’re really bad at dealing with big numbers. That is a Super Bowl blown up by terrorists, killing every single person in the building, 24 times in six months. It’s 9/11 every day for 18 months. What freedoms have we given up, what wars have we fought, what blood have we shed, what money have we spent in the interest of stopping one more 9/11? This is 9/11 every day for 18 months.”
Nobody has any answer of when sports will return. But the one thing everyone can agree on is by continuing to do what's expected of us will return sports sooner rather than later, even if that reality is farther away than we are hoping for.