
Originally Posted by
steelreserve
I hate to say it, but if you are actually going to be playing football games, you have to assume EVERY player is eventually going to get the disease. The number of players in the league makes it statistically very unlikely that zero players have it at any given time. As in, if it affected 0.5% of the population, which test results suggest is a very conservative estimate, then that gives you a 99.979% chance that there is at least one infected player.
And let's not kid ourselves, there are no precautions you can take during the actual playing of a football game that are going to stop it from spreading from one player to another. People are grabbing each other, laying on top of each other in big piles, sweating, spitting, breathing hard the whole time. You are not going to preemptively catch every case of it in the league before it spreads, either, so you can forget about that.
The good news is, for people in the 20-35 age range, the mortality rate is almost nil. (Like, 1-2 in 10,000 for that group up to age 44.) That still gives you a 15% chance someone would die if everyone got infected. But, since well over 90% of those are people with other serious health problems, that drops it to more like 1% (that anyone in the whole league would die) if you remove those at-risk players. Probably lower still, considering that most of these players are in peak physical condition, not just average.
So basically, anyone with asthma, anyone with diabetes, anyone with a heart condition doesn't play, doesn't practice, doesn't come anywhere near the team. Then anyone who doesn't feel comfortable playing has a choice not to. Then you go ahead and take that sub-1% chance and hope it works out.
Of course, there is no way in hell anyone is going to sign off on that. But the truth of it is, that is still what they are going to be doing anyway if they hold a season, no matter what kinds of protocols and testing and who knows what else are in place. That is all just decoration to make it seem like there is anything they can do about it.
In reality, if they do go forward, what will inevitably happen is one player tests positive the first week, and then all that team's games will get postponed and no one will know what to do schedule-wise, and there will be talk of a shortened season with COVID bye weeks ... then if they make it to Week 2, several other players will test positive - and if they haven't suspended the whole season indefinitely yet, then Lockdown II will be kicking in across roughly California, New York, Washington (state/DC), Illinois, Michigan, and possibly several other states, and then they will have no choice.
Since the question will likely come up, if I were doing it personally, yes, I would just go ahead with the plan and take the 1% risk, and everyone would have their own choice about whether or not to participate. Open up the stadium, ban anyone over 50 from attending, and they all likewise have a choice. Snowball's chance in hell of that, though, people think it's the plague by now.