All of the efforts that have been put into trying to continue professional baseball during the COVID-19 pandemic seemed threatened on Monday when Major League Baseball reported a game between the Florida Marlins and Baltimore Orioles was canceled because more than a dozen Marlin players had tested positive for COVID-19.
The Marlins are coming off a three-game series with the Philadelphia Phillies, who were supposed to play the New York Yankees Monday night. That game, however, was canceled so that Phillies’ players could undergo COVID-19 testing.
It doesn’t necessarily take the players to make a mistake in their quarantine to come into contact with COVID-19. It could be spread by a food service worker, sanitation specialist, equipment manager or trainer — any of the wide number of people needed to care for a team in training.
When an institution like MLB starts having COVID-19 outbreaks as its season starts, it becomes easy to see how other institutions where people gather are going to struggle with COVID-19 in the coming months. This includes schools, prep sports, club events, etc.
When COVID-19 was first being analyzed for the public in January it seemed like any other virus coming out of a foreign nation — SARS, H1N1, the West Nile Virus, etc. These previous illnesses have not carried illness and death into the United States like COVID-19.
On Jan. 24, our Senate representatives were briefed that this was a different virus because it was more contagious than other viruses, there was no vaccine and the only way to reduce cases was by quarantining the population for a long period of time to “flatten the curve” of case growth.
We know many of these Senators and some of their aides took this news seriously, because several sold stock because they could see the losses that were going to occur. A long-term aide to a New Hampshire senator made an investment in Clorox. There are numerous other examples of these kinds of transactions and behavior.
While some of these representatives were busy taking care of their own interests, what was done to prepare the American people? We were told not to worry because COVID-19 would go away, like a miracle it would just be gone.
When cases were initially low in Florida and Texas, their respective governors, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, were heralded as geniuses. Those doing the praising, of course, weren’t paying attention to science or reality. Now Florida and Texas are two of the states with the fastest growing cases of COVID-19 in the nation.
We’ve tried to go back to normal, but as a nation we flunked our “safer at home”/quarantine period. People complained about the virus being a hoax — including President Donald Trump. Despite strong warnings by doctors for people to wear face masks and properly socially distance themselves, our leaders didn’t wear masks and even kept shaking hands.
This egregiously dangerous behavior continues. Vice President Mike Pence visited the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota last week, he didn’t wear a mask and there’s evidence he didn’t socially distance himself. What message does that send to the general public? It says to people, “If the Vice President has the right not to wear a mask at the Mayo Clinic, I have the right not to wear a mask at the grocery store.” Nobody is above the law in our United States. Both President Trump and Pence don’t wear masks in public places where they don’t have six feet of social distance between others. It’s no wonder people throw tantrums about wearing masks. We have had such bad examples.
We know so much more about the virus now than we did in January. It’s more contagious than the flu, there is no vaccine, asymptomatic carriers of the virus can cause it to spread with no notice to the people around them.
Yet schools are planning to open, high school sports are about to begin. We’re at height of our number of cases and daily deaths during the pandemic. We’re planning to take steps that will increase cases significantly.
COVID-19 has been a contributing cause related in 150,000 deaths in the United States in about six months. This rate of deaths is faster than combat deaths in the Civil War. COVID-19 deaths already surpass the number of combat deaths in the Vietnam and Korean wars together.
If a professional baseball team, with all of its financial resources can’t prevent its players, who have been quarantined for weeks, from getting COVID-19, how are we supposed to stop it at local levels where we have far fewer resources and greater points of contact between citizens?
We continue to go about the battle against COVID-19 without paying attention to what our medical professionals are telling us. As long as that happens, virtually all efforts to return to some sort of pre-pandemic social and cultural conditions will be futile.
Federal aid is going to corporations — some that need it, some that don’t. Federal aid to unemployed workers, who have lost their jobs during the pandemic, is lapsing.
A government, that should be performing at its optimum capability for the good of the American people, is tangled in civil rights equality issues leading right up to the Capitol steps. Protests and violence related to racial equality continue across the nation.
Green County seems so far away from these problems, with the exception of the crippling economic stranglehold that tightens further against some, but not all, small businesses and local residents.
It is difficult not to think about these things when trying to plan for the future.
The hope is the virus just goes away. Science tells us that without significant unified action to mitigate the effects of this virus, it may be with us for a long time. We have the ability to do several things to mitigate this pandemic, what we lack is the knowledge, willingness and leadership to get these things done.
— Matt Johnson is publisher of the Monroe Times. His column is published Wednesdays.
