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Just my 2 cents by UpperEastSideIrish

We can't live in fear of this thing. If you can die from catching it from a teammate, you can also die from catching it on campus, in the grocery store or anywhere else.

I live in Manhattan. I'm young and not at risk. I chose to live my life as fully as I possibly could (despite all the lock downs here). I didn't care if I got it. I volunteered providing food to those who couldn't go out. At least 3 people on my route, all older, passed away. My 79 year old friend at church died. But I go to the park and golf both outdoors and inside at the simulators. I refused to go to Mass or see my older parents until I knew it was safe. But I didn't live in fear either.

I got the disease. It was nothing. Slept it off in 2 days and was fine. I was one of the lucky ones.

We make choices all the time. People work in coal mines and build skyscrapers. People ride motorcycles and jump out of airplanes for kicks.

Stay away from older and at risk people. But don't tell me a 19 year old kid is taking a bigger risk from COVID than from playing football. I would suspect your chance of dying from COVID at 20 years old is probably close to the chance you have of getting paralyzed in a college football game. If anything, they're both pretty low.

We've scared each other and convinced each other that this disease is a once in a lifetime thing, that it significantly harms most people who get it. That's not true. We lived through the Hong Kong Flu. The Asian Flu. SARS. Swine Flu. These things come around and they barely make the history books. Schools and theatres and stores all stayed open in NY during the Spanish Flu. What is different here is the mass need for hospitalizations.

Ask yourself this - if the disease was equally as deadly, but did not require hospitalizations, would we be in any sort of lock down now? Would we be wearing masks? Debating college football?

The truth is that we really don't know the mortality rate yet, or the long term repercussions of getting a bad case of the disease. We won't for a while, despite what all the talking heads say.

In my mind, there's no risk of playing football without fans beyond living your life as you would anyway. If school opens at ND, these kids will get COVID anyway. But given all the (in some cases warranted, some cases unwarranted) hysteria about this disease, the first breakout that happens on a team is going to shut down the season.

So just shut it down now. My guess is that the next generations of doctors will believe we overreacted, but like I said - we really don't know.