North American Pro Sports Are Almost Certainly Not Happening in 2020
By 
As bad as the conduct of MLB owners (and their pathetic media lickspittles) has been as they try to renege on a deal they made and give less money to the players who are actually assuming the health risk, I haven’t been writing about it because the idea that pro sports could come back depended on assumptions that public officials would take measures to suppress the virus that simply aren’t being taken. I just don’t see a way around this:
The Tampa Bay Lightning closed their facilities Thursday after three players and additional staff tested positive for the novel coronavirus.The closure comes some two weeks after players were allowed to return to their respective facilities to take part in voluntary on- and off-ice workouts. Players were allowed to skate in groups of up to six at a time.
Lightning general manager Julien BriseBois said in a statement that the players have self-isolated and are asymptomatic “other than a few cases of low-grade fever.”
BriseBois said the facility will remain shut down until the team can ensure a safe environment for reopening.
Two MLB teams with training facilities in the Tampa area have already shut down too. And, astoundingly, the NBA’s plan is to have their entire playoff played in Rick DeSantis’s conservertarian dystopia. I see no flaws in this plan!
But surely DeSantis is considering changing course now that the wages of his nihilistic incompetence are becoming clear…
As Florida reported another record day of new COVID-19 cases on Friday, with 3,822, Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed back against suggestions that the state may become the next epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus pandemic and that it’s quickly running out of hospital beds to care for patients.
At a press conference in Miami with local hospital executives and state and local leaders, DeSantis said that most of the state’s new cases have been found among younger people with milder symptoms and insisted that Florida has plenty of hospital beds available.
“A lot of the people who are testing positive now are not symptomatic,” he said.
Well OK then.
Many American public officials are making extremely bad choices resolving what they consider a tradeoff between “things getting back to mostly normal” and “letting many people unnecessarily die,” and the result will be that they get the latter but not the former.