SOUTH BEND, Indiana – The relative calm surrounding Notre Dame’s voluntary break in the internship program is worrying to say the least.
Not because taking off on Wednesday and Thursday a week after the start of the education camp is the forerunner of the beginning of the end of Notre Dame’s attempt to play fall football in 2020, but because of the lack of promises that the opposite is true.
A two-sentence press from the sports department, published Wednesday, described the pause’s reasoning succinctly and ambiguously as “a maximum degree of caution.”
All this less than 24 hours after University President John I. Jenkins announced a conditional transition from campus to distance for all undergraduate students over the next two weeks, among other restrictive measures.
A Notre Dame spokesman showed Wednesday that “a lot of caution” included the entire football list that was retested Wednesday, two days after the last tests. The hope is to get the effects until Friday, there are no guarantees.
Later Wednesday afternoon, Notre Dame’s football opponent on November 27, North Carolina, announced that he had suspended all sporting activities until at least Thursday at 5 p.m., highlighting the continued upward trend in positive COVID-19 cases on his campus.
NEW PLAN: What’s next for school football players who have canceled the season?
BEST OF THE BEST: U.S. TODAY pre-season school football team
SILENCIEUX TREATMENT: Big Ten worsens cancellation in a minute
North Carolina completed in-person training on Monday for the fall semester of the outbreak and sent home its normal student population.
Football at Notre Dame was first given the soft green Tuesday through Jenkins to continue training, which is why Wednesday’s news called for more context. Swarbrick, once hit through the Tribune, refused to do so.
On September 2, 10 days before the season with Duke begins, it is now the highest date on the Notre Dame football schedule.
Jenkins, in his live speech Tuesday delivering improved COVID-19 protocols, admitted that, first, he was able to send all students home without delay for the rest of the semester. After consulting with St. Joseph County’s deputy health director Mark Fox, Jenkins opted for two weeks of online learning starting Wednesday.
While the number of instances and positivity rates did not show a significant improvement at the end of this era (September 2), Jenkins said it would be his original concept of finishing home studies. By noon on Wednesday, the positivity rate had reached a record 20.6% and had increased 8 consecutive days to 17.2% cumulatively since students began returning to campus on August 3.
By comparison, Indiana’s seven-day positivity remains at 7.7%.
Quarterback Ian Book among The Notre Dame players who used social media on Wednesday, imploring their classmates to follow the new guidelines.
“Please start/continue to quarantine and social distance,” the eBook posted on Instagram. “We believe the duty of peers to others. No one needs to go home, so let’s take action and make changes … #WeAreND
The road to The Notre Dame season through remaining one of the 76 schools in the Subdivision Bowl that intends to play in the fall and not enroll in the 54 that are not, is not an undeniable calculation. It seems more like a complex and not entirely explosive calculation.
Where there have been inconsistent messages and responses in our country about the virus, science has increased the opportunity.
Affordable saliva testing with fast response times is suddenly a truth and can have a massive effect on the game and beyond once production is higher in the coming weeks. Side flow tests are also on the horizon. The concept is a piece of paper that can be administered at home and without having to be sent to a lab, similar to a pregnancy test. They would be cheap, easy to produce on a large scale and with a reaction time of 10 to 15 minutes.
Notre Dame admitted in a press release that the recent campus peak has exceeded the school’s exam capacity and is strengthening resources to cope with this increase. The school had an explanation for why to be positive in the process.
During its pre-registration tests, there were 33 positive tests in 11836 tests for 0.28% positivity.
The football team’s numbers were equally impressive, even though Monday’s last batch of tests was not completed Wednesday night and has not yet been published.
The football team, in the last report, had a positivity rate of 0.64 since it arrived in mid-June for voluntary training. And this August 12 report included two positives recorded since the return of the students.
Before that, a football player had tested positive for his arrival and tested positive since the first test circular, for a total of 4 positives for the summer.
As Book’s request implied, our behaviour has an effect on COVID-19 figures. So far, the unusual theme of sudden and sudden increases on college campuses has been off-campus parties where mitigation methods have been largely or utterly ignored.
Accepting the all-too-common chorus “school students will be school academics” absolves the irresponsible, regardless of their political affiliation, whether they are regularly masked or unmasked, their decisions have consequences.
And those consequences are limited to their own lives.
Why can’t they also be required to do what they like, but to do it intelligently and safely this semester?
Some other people think that North Carolina academics going home is the most productive thing for North Carolina football because players have more about their own destiny. But the school will face the moral question of whether it has the right to play without students on campus.
Notre Dame, either through Jenkins or Swarbrick, has already answered this query with a resounding “no” when imbued with the hypothetical. But would it be a more complicated escape trapdoor as a full (albeit temporary) member of the CCA and not as an independent?
And at this point, would it be fair to the team, who made the sacrifices this summer to make it all work?
My favorite phrase about schools navigating in unprecedented global cases that seek to succeed over the pitfalls to at least succeed at the starting line comes from Notre Dame football team doctor Dr. Mark Leiszler.
“There’s a detail of this that looks like building a plane while you’re flying it,” he said in early June, and that’s still true.
It’s time to fasten your seat belts.