Over 120 NBA players are out due to Covid-19 protocols. To put that into perspective, NBA rosters are reduced to 15 during the regular season, meaning there are 450 total players in the league. A quarter of them are out. In a league that is 97% vaccinated.
It's not just professional or American sports either. Across the world, games are being canceled, players and coaches are being quarantined like it's going out of style, and seasons are being prematurely cut short. And similar to 2020, a specific portion of the population is starting to rev up the Covid fear engine again, calling for blanket cancellations, lockdowns, and mandates.
The media would have you believe these troubles are due to the “dreaded” Omicron variant, but as with most of the information published about Covid-19, the truth is often suppressed for the sake of orchestrating a specific narrative.
One of the things that has blown my mind about our country’s response to Covid-19 since March of 2020 is all the talk about “how difficult Covid-19 has made our lives.” You can’t listen to the news for more than ten minutes without hearing about the “psychological struggle” and “mental anguish” that Covid-19 is putting society through.
What shocks me is not that these issues are being referenced so often. They are rightfully being mentioned. There has absolutely been a remarkable psychological struggle relating to Covid-19 in our society. I have no doubt that many people are experiencing devastating mental health consequences, the true ramifications of which we will never fully understand, especially as they relate to children and education.
No. What shocks me is that people are attributing these mental health issues to Covid-19 itself.
In reality, the psychological anguish and devastating mental health consequences our society has endured since 2020 have virtually NOTHING to do with Covid-19 itself. They are the result of our society’s fear laden overreaction to the virus and, more significantly, the draconian, mentally debilitating restrictions that have arisen from it.
Let’s go back to professional sports for a minute. They provide such a delightfully transparent overview of all the mistakes that have been made in regards to Covid-19 that it’s almost comical.
For all intents and purposes, the NBA and the NFL are fully vaccinated. Technically they aren’t at 100%, but the notion of reaching 100% is a pipe dream and they are so close that it would be absurd to say they haven’t reached the threshold at which the vaccine should start being “effective”.
So in both of these leagues, we now have the ultimate, unbiased case study on two things:
1.) How well the vaccine works, and
2.) Whether or not the league's Covid-19 protocols work
If we're being honest, once you reach near 100% vaccination, measuring effectiveness becomes pretty simple. Cases either plummet or they don’t. If they do, congratulations, we know the vaccine works. If they don’t, and especially if cases soar, we know the vaccine doesn’t work, at least at stopping cases. It's at that point which you have to move to step two, which are the response protocols.
Initially, the NBA’s Covid-19 rules stated that any player who tested positive had to quarantine for 10 days, regardless of health status. This means even if a person feels completely healthy and is totally asymptomatic, he is out for 10 days, no matter what. Just like society, the NBA preliminarily defined its critical metric concerning Covid-19, as cases. Any case, anywhere, you're out.
And just like in society, these ill advised protocols caused massive unnecessary and avoidable problems.
Player after player, team after team, was crushed by extensive quarantines, to the point where multiple teams were signing bums like me to ten day contracts because they didn’t have enough actual NBA players to fill their rosters.
It got so bad that multiple players, coaches, and media members started rightfully questioning if the NBA’s Covid guidelines were appropriate, necessary, and/or sustainable. Even LeBron James, the face of the NBA, took to Instagram to question whether it made sense to have perfectly healthy professional athletes sitting out for 10 days simply because a nasal swab told them they were positive for something they otherwise would have had no clue existed.
So guess what the powers that be in NBA did? They did the same thing the NFL did.
They altered the guidelines. They admitted the initial protocols that were put in place were overzealous and began a repeal process that I guarantee will slowly progress until league rules start to resemble the normal we remember.
And they did it when cases were as HIGH as they’ve ever been. That’s really important.
It's really important because it represents an acceptance of reality that our society as a whole has not been able to reach yet. One of the biggest reasons our society hasn't been able to better navigate Covid-19 is because there's been this lingering and pervasive delusion about how we would ultimately get rid of it. The delusion states we beat Covid-19 by utterly eradicating it through mandates and protocols, and then, once it's completely gone, we remove the mandates and return to normal.
But this deluded mindset fails on two levels. One, the protocols and mandates aren't solving the problem, and two, they've become a FAR bigger problem.
You see, just like society, the NBA and the NFL don’t have a Covid-19 problem. They have a Covid-19 imposed regulations problem.
I don't know why I have to keep saying this, but Covid-19 presents as a cold to the staggeringly overwhelming majority of healthy people. And as you might have guessed, professional athletes are typically pretty healthy. So these leagues are finally coming to a three pronged realization that society as a whole has to come to:
Vaccines don’t prevent cases.
Almost all cases are mild.
We must therefore alter any protocol we have that is based on cases.
In other words, we have to address the one element of Covid-19 that actually is affecting more than 1% of the population, which isn’t Covid-19 the disease, but our mismanaged and fear based response to it.
Covid-19 hasn’t made life miserable. Covid-19 hasn’t put people through a year and a half of metal anguish like the media claims. The vast majority of people wouldn’t even have known Covid-19 existed if the media didn’t tell them about it. This is statistically true based on the actual number of people who experience the virus as anything more than a cold. So it wasn’t Covid-19.
It was us.
We put people through mental anguish by closing down schools, businesses, and a generational way of life for a year and a half. We put people through mental anguish by locking down cities and canceling holidays and masking three-year-olds. We put people through mental anguish by inundating them day after day with a fear narrative that Covid-19 was coming to kill them when according to the numbers it’s hardly coming for anybody.
Yes. We did all that, and it was wrong. But guess what.
It’s okay. It was just a mistake.
Out of an abundance of caution and an initial lack of details, we blew it. We went too far and changed too much for something that is too harmless to too many people to justify what we did. But people are waking up now. They are realizing that when it comes to Covid-19, the societally implemented “cure” was worse than the disease, and it’s not too late to fix it.
We can’t change Covid-19. It’s a thing, it exists, and it’s not going anywhere. But the true pandemic of Covid-19 isn’t the disease. It’s our society’s misguided response to it.
The NBA is starting to see that. The NFL is starting to see that.
When the American people see it, the true pandemic will end.
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