Not sure that the Inday 500 being run without fans means anything in relation to football. However, given the way people panic when an athlete is diagnosed with the bug, I get the feeling that college football will likely get shut down with relative quickness. There's no way to stop players from catching it, so if people continue to go into hysteria when players catch it, then it's not going to work out.
Of course, they won't get hysterical when those some players catch it away from the field hanging out with each other because it won't be a news item. So it'll be OK when they catch it away from football; just don't catch it while playing.
Sadly, I believe you may be correct. Covid is nothing to be taken lightly, nor engaged in wild conspiracy theories. But when even on this board you have people cheering for no season, or coming up with crazy estimates that hundreds, or thousands of football players could die, then I don’t expect a thoughtful measured response from the general public at large.
Nothing changes the fact that football players are more at risk from the general morbidity and mortality of playing the sport itself, or are in an age group that (historically) is more at risk from other respiratory pathogens, than from this virus. It’s one of the age groups where this can be stated with relative confidence, based on the data.
In the end, the best hope is that what we are seeing today is a “filling of the gaps“ by the virus, aided by the end of lockdowns and increases in social mobility, and that in a month or so what are hotspots now have significantly subsided, and the remaining “gaps to be filled” are the more remote population centers (kind of the way it to migrated from southern to Northern California at the present time).
If that hoped for abatement occurs, I think the national consciousness might be somewhat different, which could help create an environment in which a sports shutdown might be less likely.
But I’m just guessing, projecting, and hoping here.
