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Opinion
It’s Thursday here in the United States as I’m writing this.
I’ve just finished putting together my formative lists for potential starting line-ups for Round 1 of the 2020 AFL season, scheduled to start Thursday with the now-traditional Richmond-Carlton clash at the ‘G.
I’ve already sent over my Round 6 prediction article for the distaff side of the league, without any note of Richmond’s Lauren Tesoriero’s precautionary isolation over contact with a friend returning from Japan.
As I’m entering the data into my laptop, headline after headline sweep across the top of my screen:
Major League Baseball cancels spring training and suspends at least first two weeks of season.
The NCAA cancels the March Madness men’s and women’s national basketball tournaments.
The Utah Jazz are still in quarantine after a second player (Donovan Mitchell) tests positive for COVID-19; the NBA suspends all play for the foreseeable future.
The NHL suspends all hockey games across US and Canada.
The ATP and ITF announce six-week shutdown of all tennis competitions.
Add to that the news that Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson have both tested positive for the coronavirus – while currently working on the Gold Coast, where Hanks is in pre-production of an Elvis biography filming there.
As all these headlines wash over my screen, I look at the silly debates I’m writing about who should play at half-forward for a footy team and can’t help but think the obvious:
What are we doing?
Why are we still playing kids games in front of large numbers of people when every health organisation in the world is telling us to stop gathering people together?
What are we achieving in defying what has quickly become the common sense reaction to a worldwide pandemic that has shut down entire countries?
Our bushfires don’t make us any less susceptible in the cities where we gather in large numbers, rubbing elbows and sharing sweat while barracking for our club of choice in other establishments if they chose to play without people in the stands.
Every doctor I hear, read about, see, fill in the verb of your choice, tells us we need to flatten the curve to beat this virus – because of the long incubation period, because we don’t know if we’re sick until after we’ve spent five days visiting elderly family members or 30,000 of our closest friends at Docklands, because every person in our physical contact circle exponentially increases the chances of either catching this virus ourselves or potentially passing it on to individuals in our lives who are frailer than we are.
People we love and protect with everything we have.
Let’s protect them now (besides, we’ve always been curious about a 17-game, play-everyone-once season…now’s the chance to find out).
See you in six weeks or so, if the AFL does the right thing.
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