Really?

I think it is economically important to open up schools just so parents can work. People need schools for a lot of reasons but make no mistake the child care aspect is important for parents who have jobs. If that is the primary driver for opening schools I do not think they will allow any athletics to take place that would threaten the ability for the schools to stay open.

My district in TN has essentially said we will be completely in school or completely online. The have almost completely ditched the "hybrid" model becuase of logistics.

As with most difficult questions, here "right or wrong" or "should or shouldn't" all depends on the desired outcome.  What is the desired outcome here?  That brings about a very difficult question that I think most avoid out of convenience since it involves some very complicated parts  1) a novel virus, which we are learning about daily but about which the medical/scientific community is still very much in the dark  2) a segment of the population which seems more at risk than others (this somewhat relates to #1). 

Hopefully, I am a rare case on this board that has had first hand (well, maybe second hand) knowledge of the uncertainty of this virus.  An immediate family member tested positive. Based on other health factors (age, end stage COPD with less than 25% lung function, only one Kidney with suppressed functionality, high blood pressure with the systolic pressure fluctuating over 200 many days) this family member should have died from the virus.  However, the family member was completely asymptomatic, tested negative 3 times during a 20 day hospital stay in April/May (for complications from above issues) and basically lives a mostly isolated life anyway.   Only reason for the out of hospital test was as a pre procedure precaution...and  bang. Positive test.  Zero symptoms.  Another immediate family member lives in the same house... this one had 7 arteries bypassed in May. By all accounts the virus should  have transmitted to and killed this family member too.  NO symptoms. 

Other accounts obviously differ.   All of that to say that as a human populace, "should or shouldn't" and "right and wrong" are very complex because we don't know the variables involved.  That was the reason behind the shockingly swift and severe measures taken in mid March.   Unfortunately, we really don't know that much more and our environment is pretty much the same as it was 12 weeks or so ago.  So logically, what is the difference? 

There is no preventative vaccine, nore is there a therapeutic treatment for the disease caused by the virus.   However, the virus also may not impact the majority of society, as those that are infected will experience various degrees of severity.   

Actually the way this virus works it makes total sense to play football.  The football playing age practically never get seriously ill from it.  Many vaccines are about as dangerous as this unattenuated virus is on young people.  The virus should be our "vaccine", and natural spread thru the young population should be our vaccination program.

If you want to wait for a year in which it will be "safe" vs. Covid-19 to play football, good luck.  Maybe an acceptable vaccine will become available for it some year.  If you look at the testing record on it, you'll probably say, "Why was I waiting for this?  It's not proven safer on young people than the disease was!"  It might be a component vaccine that can't possibly cause infections, but that doesn't mean it can't cause reactions.  But by then nobody will want a vaccine anyway, because even with all the social distancing the virus will have gotten around enough that the only people who'd need it would be hermits so isolated from the world that they might as well just continue that lifestyle!  (I'm not anti-vax, but I also know they're not candy.)

Yesterday I attended a ritual in which we passed around a horn and drank from it.  I realized I'd never caught a cold from doing such rituals, so why should I be afraid now?

In 2008 I did catch a cold from one of my players who was sniffling and whose face I brushed near as I demonstrated on him how to angle block.  The cold led to a bronchitis and I didn't return to the field for weeks.  So there are indeed some things you should avoid when coaching!  It's well known that you catch the worst colds from kids, who themselves won't be as sick, and SARS-COV2 is just that sort of nose-infecting virus.

Similarly in 2018 I got a parainfluenza B bronchiolitis, probably from a student whose baby was sick.  That led to a brief hospitalization and I almost died from overtreatment under my conditions.  There's always something like that going around, but are you going to orient your life around the possibility of a fluke like that?

Though I think most countries are going about this the wrong way, prolonging the danger by delaying transmission, the idea that football could be severely set back by not being played for one or even several years is unsupported.  Sports have survived years of wars and refugee flight during which they couldn't be played.

This is not the first virus that's more of a threat to the old than the young.  My father was a physician and told me about how they'd encourage transmission of the common childhood viral diseases when vaccines weren't available, because childhood was the best time to catch the illness and get over it.  A minority of children were killed or lastingly disabled by these viruses, but in the absence of a vaccine you were safer taking your chances that way rather than risking the disease in adulthood.  Still, when I got measles he isolated me from my younger sister, who hadn't gotten it yet, because he knew that a vaccine for it that had been in the works for years was expected out soon.  (That vaccine was not a rush job like those currently in development for SARS-COV2, and you can expect from them what you can from any rush job.)

I still emerged from childhood without getting the mumps, so when I was about to start Pediatrics I asked to be vaccinated against it.  My father on the phone told me my chance of catching it would be very remote, but he didn't tell me not to get it.  They wouldn't administer it to an adult unless I had my antibody titer taken, but they gave the vaccine when I turned out to have no antibody.  I still don't know if the vaccine "took", but by then I was done with Pediatrics.

I have to concur with this.  Also, one of the things (besides concussions of course) that has hurt football is the year round expectations now PLUS the enormity of other options nowadays.  Add to that the possible risk of becoming seriously ill? 

I appreciate coach bob's points but i feel it's a bit of apples to oranges, no disrespect of course.  Which brings me back to my previous post which is....I'm concerned.

...and travel baseball and aau basketball.

People seem to stubbornly ignore that a significant percentage of the population that tests positive end up being asymptomatic.

Well, I think the scare is that much like 5 out of the 6 revolver chambers are empty in russian roulette...the 6th carries consequences.   Here, yes many of those that test positive for the virus may not get the disease, but could they spread the virus? 

Ultimately, this may go back full circle to some of the original conversations, saying "this is like the flu", not with regards to the epidemiology, but in regards to just living with an increased danger. 

A lot of discussion is about kids being safe from the virus, or only mild symptoms, but they all have older relatives. How would you like to be the kid who gives the virus to his grandparents and they die? That's going to happen somewhere. Do you tell the kid "I'm sorry you lost Grammy and Papa but hey, you won the league."
I'm not being flippant. My granddaughter is going to be a Senior in Volleyball and I'm very high risk. Besides sports, she's a teenager. She's going to be exposed to a lot of people. We're really close and I'm almost afraid to see her for that reason. I can't bear the idea of her thinking she might have killed her Papa because she wanted to play volleyball, etc. There's a lot of uncharted territory in this issue and no good answers yet.

Something that hasn't been mentioned is how would we know they even got it from football? I'm not saying that football isn't a bigger risk at all but the kids are going about everything business as usual.

We have had 3 weeks of practice so far. We wear the mask, we take the precautions, we disinfect and then release them and they go off campus, huddle up around a truck and drink Gatorade and shoot the sh!t for a couple of hours.

We had a spike in a city here a few weeks ago because some booger eaters had a house party and someone there was infected. So I'm finding it hard to believe that they could truly blame one thing or the other unless they force everyone to get tested prior to doing anything socially.

Exactly why everything we're doing now is just tilting at windmills but nobody has the stones to stand up and say the season is off yet.  They're all trying to let someone else be the first to cancel the season, then everybody will.

Unfortunately this is what I have been afraid of with all this.  Who's gonna do it first so then everyone can just fall in line behind them, just like when schools started shutting down. It was just the first tiny snowball that started the avalanche.

I also think there has to be some kind of level system for the symptoms/how severe people have it.  You could test positive and be asymptomatic all the way to ICU care with cases.  People are hearing positive case and automatically thinking it's a death sentence.

That's exactly what I am thinking here in MA

I am 68 years old. I also have some health risks.
If the NFL, which is testing frequently, and has much better medical resources then I have in a High School setting, can not control transmission, how can I expect my school system to protect me?

Asymptomatic transmission is a major problem.

I'm not going to coach this coming season unless the circumstances change.