To avoid local fitness restrictions from the pandemic, San Jose State University made a radical decision last week.
He moved his football team 325 miles north of Humboldt County, where the Spartans began education indefinitely on some other school campus while completing their online homework.
Resettlement is designed to allow the team to have more vital practices in a less restrictive county. Such preparation is “imperative” as the start of the team’s season approaches on October 24, sports director Marie Tuite said in a statement.
The county house saw things differently.
“We are very disappointed to see a team leave the county to circumvent a procedure that has been put in position to ensure the protection of its players and staff,” Santa Clara County told USA TODAY.
Such is the state of interruption in those days in school football. It’s everywhere, adding through the bus.
Several leagues are looking to return this month and the next, after they first decided it was safer to wait until 2021, adding those whose members had not yet been authorized for normal practices under local fitness orders starting Wednesday, such as Stanford. Colorado.
Low-level leagues are sticking to their resolve not to play this year, such as the Ivy League. Other primary leagues with many fans in the South and Texas play more than usual, with limited stadium attendance of around 15,000 or more. LSU even said it would no longer be necessary to pass a medical checkup to enter the stadium.
“Lately we are living a wonderful experience,” said Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious disease expert at Stanford who consulted the Pac-12 Conference on COVID-19. “We don’t know enough about (the new coronavirus) and we don’t see what it does with young people. “
So what’s the right approach?What’s the challenge anyway, given that hospitalizations are rare for young inflamed players?And was it a coincidence that most of the country’s elite universities have not yet played this year or have taken so long to pursue the game in 2020?a primary team in West Texas is playing lately (BYU)?
USA TODAY has been interviewing public fitness experts about this now that elementary school football is back in all 10 primary leagues. Their responses denied any sense of normalcy that might accompany the return of Big Ten and Pac-12 football on 24 October and 6 November, respectively.
“The disjointed backlash in school football is a mirror image of a general lack of coordinated national backlash,” said Zach Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College, Emory University. “College football is quite similar to the rest of the country. If you play it, it is very difficult.
It is confusing in the giant component because many answers are unknown.
“We’ve been suffering with this new entity that’s immersed ourselves in us, and we’ve been running scientifically to perceive how it works, what motivates it, how it interacts with our immune system, how it works epidemiologically and moves, and how we can control it,” said Jeffrey Shaman, epidemiologist at Columbia University. “That’s the problem. There are so many things we don’t know about it. You may simply start listing critical issues that we don’t yet perceive. “
For example: why is the virus much more destructive to some people than to others, adding other young people who have died?Are there long-term harmful effects if you don’t have primary symptoms in the first place?How often can a user be reinfected and worse next time?
As of August, fears about myocarditis have become a widespread fear for athletes recovering from COVID-19. The importance of such central inflammation is not yet clear, Binney said.
COVID-19 is scary because it has caused more than 210,000 deaths in the United States and does not yet have an effective cure or vaccine. Other unknowns are pushing public fitness experts even more to exercise caution. The biggest threat is that young players would possibly spread the disease. to more vulnerable portions of the network, even if they do not appear to be physically affected.
Infectious disease experts are the lack of crowds in the stadiums and daily immediate check scores to determine if players and staff have been infected.
Unlike Power’s other five leagues, Big Ten and Pac-12 pledged to perform daily checks and not crowds before returning to play. Both did not have to play in the past in 2020, but were reversed after the availability of daily checks, beginning with the announced Pac-12 deal with checkmaker Quidel in early September.
“It’s not foolproof, but it’s an intelligent system,” Shaman said. “I think the question you have to ask yourself is: why do you do this (you play football)?You have no enthusiasts in the stadium. That’s very wise. Why do you do it differently?. . . do it for the women’s football team?Or do they just do it because they have TV revenue?»
Even a limited crowd of games is wrong, said Binney, who claimed they provided only “minimum benefits” that did not value the threat of increased transmission of the disease that accompanies them, especially since those who are willing to congregate in the Stadiums probably should not take precautions to distance the socially and wear masks. In last weekend’s Auburn-Georgia setting in Athens, Georgia, for example, many stands enthusiasts were not dressed in masks.
At LSU, the Tigers announced this week that they would allow the sale of alcohol and no longer want fitness checks to enter the stadium, to reduce waiting times and crowds at ports of entry. louisiana, where there were about 5,600 deaths caused by COVID-19.
None of LSU’s movements are a smart idea, Binney said. Alcohol intake leads to more reckless behavior, not less.
“And if the queues accumulate, then less enthusiasts will come to your games or more people will perform welfare checks so that other people pass in a timely manner,” he said. “It’s a very anti-football philosophy, frankly, because it needs rewards without doing the job. “
Meanwhile, 39 states recently reported more coronavirus cases last week compared to last week, and the flu season is likely to increase the risk.
The story continues the video:
Different approaches and other start times of the season have emerged in a way that vaguely resembles political division in the United States.
In the southeast, the 12 large and parts of the Atlantic Coast Conference dominate the southern politically red component of the country east of New Mexico. First, none of those 3 Power Five leagues made the decision to wait until 2021. Everyone made the decision to start playing football last month with a limited number of spectators in stadiums and plan to check 3 times a week, American schools can check more if they want.
This contrasts with the politically blue pac-12 and the ten greats of the West and Midwest, which have pledged not to pile up and conduct daily testing after deciding that it was safer to wait until 2021.
“There is no doubt that this largely reflects a political divide, which is so disappointing,” Binney said. “People may have other threat tolerances. I’m not saying there’s a one-way solution for the whole country. “”
In the West, football is as popular as in the deep south, where tolerance for the threat of COVID-19 infections also appears to be greater, if only on the basis of its limited crowd decisions.
This tolerance for threats, monetary considerations and public tension have contributed to thinking about how and when to return to school football, but a science-based decision-making culture is also part of the mix, or at least based on your missions For some, it is probably a more vital accessory than others.
Consider the club at the prestigious American Association of Universities (AAU), an organization that can only be invited to 63 leading universities in the US. U. S. , plus Canadá. De the 56 AAU members who play football at school, only thirteen started playing in the last month. The others did not play at all this year, such as Ivy League members, or waited until the end of this month or the next day after seeking more common test skills, such as in the Pac-12. and the big ten.
Of the 26 pac-12 and Big Ten schools combined, 22 are members of the AAU (85%). Nebraska, which has led the rate of playing again before, is the Big Ten school that isn’t. In CRAZY FOOTBALL SEC and Big 12 schools, seven are members of the AAU (29%).
Only one U. S. Conference school in the U. S. Conference has been able to do so. But it’s not the first time He is part of the AAU: Rice, who is also the only member of this league who has yet to play a match as a precautionary measure.
An AAU spokesman, Pedro Ribeiro, said last month that the AAU had given its members no indication of the resumption of athletics, but also noted that “the AAU club is based on being one of America’s leading universities of studies, which has much more to do with the decision. “
The state of San Jose still hopes to get permission to have normal practices in its own garden instead of 325 miles away. Since last July, the Spartans have been allowed to carry out activities involving 16 other people or less in their Santa Clara County home. In Humboldt County, you will participate in an 11-on-11 team training. The school also noted that it had only had two positive asymptomatic tests in more than two months of testing.
In response, Santa Clara County said it understood “the preference of many sports groups to resume practice, just as many corporations are eager to resume it. But our county remains in the red category, where the threat of spread (coronavirus) is substantial. “
Near Berkeley, California, local restrictions limited Cal’s football team to physically remote cohort education of up to 25 people, with limited shared devices within cohorts. The team’s coach, Justin Wilcox, called Wednesday the other approaches across the country “disturbing. “
Uncertainty looms there and elsewhere.
“A lot of things can be replaced over the next month and a half,” said Stephen Kissler, a researcher at Harvard’s THChan School of Public Health. “We would probably be on the rise and start a downward wave of transmission. I wouldn’t be surprised if (college football) retracted the decision, but I think the main thing is to be open to that.
Follow journalist Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: bschrotenb@usatoday. com