Normally, we look forward to the first WVU home football game of the season, but this year, we’re looking on with more trepidation than anything else.
At the time of this writing, West Virginia leads the nation in the rate of COVID-19 spread. Between Saturday and Wednesday, the state logged an additional 5,553 cases. In the four weeks since we first broke the 3,000 death threshold, we’ve added another 180-plus deaths. That’s an average of 45 deaths per week.
And now Morgantown is gearing up to host a super-spreader event tomorrow.
Because also at the time of this writing, Milan Puskar Stadium will be open to full capacity and tailgating will go on as if we weren’t in the fourth (fifth? sixth?) wave of a global pandemic. Masks are “encouraged” but not required and neither is vaccination.
In other words, it will be a maskless-palooza for the largely unvaccinated, because more than 40% of West Virginians 12-and-older still are not fully vaccinated.
Hence, a super-spreader event.
For months, singing was banned in churches because singing produced more potentially contagious droplets than speaking. But we’re going to allow maskless fans to scream and cheer and holler.
For months, social gatherings were nixed because so many of them couldn’t be done with proper social distancing. But we’re going to pack spectators in shoulder-to-shoulder, and at the end of the game, we’re going to send them home to the far reaches of the state and the surrounding region.
For months, we did the barest of essential activities that would put us in contact with other people so as to slow the spread of a disease that has now killed more than 642,000 Americans. But we’re going to toss all that carefulness and sacrifice aside for a few hours of entertainment.
And somehow, no one in a position of authority has seemed to realize the irony — the hubris — of flaunting pandemic protocols in the shadow of one of Morgantown’s largest health care providers. Can you imagine what a slap in the face it will be to the doctors, nurses and staff who have been fighting COVID for over a year to look out from the hospital windows and see a super-spreader event in the making?
We stand by our assertion from this summer that the policy should be no shots, no football, but since that obviously won’t happen, WVU Athletics should at the very least require masks. Fans are already required to use clear plastic bags of limited size as part of public health and safety measures — it’s not a stretch to required fans to bring and wear a face covering.
We all have pandemic fatigue, but it’s frustrating, bordering on infuriating, to watch all of our hard-fought progress be thrown away on a football game that can just as easily be watched from the comfort and safety of people’s homes.
Honestly, we hope we’re wrong. We hope, by some miracle, tomorrow’s game doesn’t cause a drastic spike in cases throughout Morgantown and West Virginia. Because there’s no satisfaction in saying “we told you so” to someone on a ventilator.
