Stop the Scold!
Hey folks. The Super Bowl was really boring! Which was unexpected! My former amateur sportswriter self has a couple of takes about the game but I’ll spare you.
One thing I noticed on my mostly liberal-ish Twitter feed was people expressing immense displeasure with the NFL for having 24,000 or so fans (7,500 of whom were already vaccinated healthcare workers, whose presence there should serve as some signal of approval of the safety of the event) at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa which holds more than 65,000 people. Lots of people liked these Tweets. Now, this is nothing new. Plenty of people like plenty of Tweets I think are bad. I also think these Tweets might have been a way for people to signal their displeasure with the NFL as an organization for all the things they’ve done and continue to do wrong, which, fair. (My super galaxy brain take is that the NFL = all that liberals view as bad with America and corporations so reflexively showing you don’t like the NFL is good for your liberal bonafides. Which, fair! Do what you gotta do!)
But I found it frustrating that seemingly some small slice of the public thought it acceptable to scold (without knowing anything!) people for attending an event in a clearly responsible way. Obviously, I get how I sound right now. Narrowly, I am complaining about how the internet pushes people to be dumb, to rage-post, to rage-like, and move on to the next thing. But, there is a broader point here.
The NFL, from most reporting on the subject, has actually been pretty good about containing and not spreading COVID-19 amongst its fans. According to NFL chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills, they have “not traced any outbreak or cluster of cases to any of the places we’ve had hosted fans.” Big grain of salt there, as we know the NFL has a past of covering up health related issues. But, I think it’s fair to assume that it’s true that the NFL has been successful in terms of having fans at some of their stadiums and not spreading COVID-19. Over 1 million people have been to 116 NFL games this season, so I think it’s fair to assume there is not some big conspiracy afoot where people are catching COVID-19 due to their being at an NFL game and then not reporting it or whatever. We’d probably know.
And that’s good! I know we joke that it is still March 2020 a lot, and in a lot of ways that feeling is very real, but we cannot expect to still live like it’s March or April 2020 with everyone on complete lockdown and so forth. That was bad and very hard and also sort of a result of not having a complete understanding of how COVID-19 spread and us not all having the proper tools to protect us from it on an individual level. We know how to be safe and responsible now, and if the situation allows for it, we should at the least be ok with other people doing normal life things but in a safe and responsible way. It’s a step in the direction of normality and is good for our mental health and the economy.
We simply cannot expect nor ask everyone to live like we are still in lockdown and we should not finger wag people who go about their lives in a safe way. That’s being completely unaware of the science, of what we currently know, and of human nature.
In fact, we should be hopeful that the NFL, and other public gatherings like it, have gone off without huge case counts following it. That’s good! We are learning how to live and go about our lives in a semi normal way while in the pandemic. And things will only get better as cases continue to drop and more people get vaccinated and herd immunity increases.
To be clear, following the advice of public health officials is still important and being a responsible citizen is the best way to fend off this pandemic. We just need to remember that everyone is different, and some people are going to make different risk assessments about the way they go about their daily lives, so if someone decides to go to a football (and soon baseball) game outside with a mask on and is smart, that’s their prerogative! Be safe and smart!
We should welcome people and organizations who are doing things in responsible manners. We were not meant to live in a kind of lockdown for more than a year. That’s just unfeasible. Now, at the same time, we need to be cognisant of lockdown fatigue and not start getting lax with our safety and stuff. That would be bad for everyone. And we need to stay vigilant as the new strains start to infiltrate our communities (I personally wear two masks when doing inside things and I recommend you do too!). We just cannot expect people to live in complete lockdown until this thing is contained and should not scold people for going about their lives in a responsible way.
