COVID-19 creeps into Football Friday Night

Virus fatigue seems to be at its peak, or its nadir, depending on how you look at it. Either way, COVID-19 doesn’t seem to care. That much is clear in my household.

Start with the 16-year-old high school soccer player. He was in concussion protocol and sat out a game against a team that subsequently produced positive tests. Hooray for concussions!

But wait. My son and his mates got tested — and there was a positive among them. The offshoot? The varsity was placed into quarantine and the JV was pressed into tournament duty Thursday night.

Then, there is my 13-year-old middle schooler. Our district is doing hybrid learning and she has to present herself in class only two days a week. One day, she was in the front row and the substitute teacher, it was later found, tested positive. And my youngest daughter went into quarantine with her older brother.

Then, there is my 26-year-old, who is a high school teacher wrangling with the vagaries of her job. At her school, a football coach tested positive — and, poof, there went the playoffs. The program had to be shut down.

These three of my children were tested or re-tested this week. They all came back negative. And their parents put on masks before they exhaled, gustily, with relief. For a minute, they put aside any concerns about the accuracy of the tests.

“A few of these incidents have popped up the last couple of weeks,” said Steve Blackledge, the longtime and highly decorated preps reporter at The Dispatch.

He presented examples: High school football coaches at Middletown and Wilmington high schools had positive tests and their teams’ seasons were abruptly scratched; a positive test at Eastmoor Academy led to a forfeit against Granville; the Whitehall and Bexley soccer teams, both of which have cause to aspire,

were placed into quarantine and their tournament futures went up in the air; two Whitehall soccer players also run cross cross country and will miss their league meet this weekend.

Said one Middletown senior football player to WCPO-TV in Cincinnati: “Getting told our last game against our rival was closed, shut down, our season was over … Yeah. It hurt.”

There seem to be fewer and fewer sanctuaries amid this pandemic, which now presses into its eighth month with the no promise of slacking. Your heart goes out to the children who’ve had something stolen – the last soccer or football game they would have ever played, their theater program, their entire senior year … Their time has been cracked.

Tim Stried, a spokesman for the Ohio High School Athletic Association, added this positive sentiment for the sake of balance: “We had 648 out of 709 schools opt into the football playoffs. It’s not perfect. But it’s better than what a lot of people would’ve thought in July.”

True, that.

As I write this at my dining room table, my nextdoor neighbor just sneezed. Do I close the window? I text my favorite epidemiologist. Mark Cameron is a professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Sciences at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine. He’s working on a vaccine. I probably don’t have to close the window. “Twenty- to 29-year-olds are disproportionally infected right now,” Cameron said. “The reservoir of the virus has expanded immeasurably in our children and young-adult dependents. Some know they are infected, some don’t.

“The transmission map quickly goes from within a group of students to, potentially, their families, and through other contacts along the way.”

Gov. Mike Dewine’s public briefings about coronavirus now feel like a rite of the spring and summer. A quaint diversion. Background noise. Yet, COVID-19 has never been more prevalent in Ohio (and the same is true in most states.)

Reading this newspaper or scrolling through dispatch.com reveals this truth. Hospitalizations for the infected have doubled over the past month. Records are being set for confirmed positives. The rate of infection is on the increase.

“A huge surge upward that we’re starting to see is going to do nothing good for the economy,” Dewine said earlier this week. “It’s going to slow things down. It’s going to bring about schools going totally remote, and we’re already starting to see that in some communities in Ohio where the virus has risen up. Teachers have gotten sick, students have been quarantined and schools have had to pull back and go remote.”

The Big Ten football season gets underway this weekend. Cameron liked the protocols that were laid down by the conference last month. He is reassessing the situation in light of the latest surge, but that is a column for another day.

Stay safe. Wear a mask. Practice safe distancing. Vigilance has become wearisome but remains necessary. For the kids. And don’t hug them.

marace@dispatch.com