West Virginia president Gordon Gee discusses what could happen if football player tests positive for COVID-19
When it comes to getting football started in 2020, no one has been more adamant about getting it back than West Virginia president E. Gordon Gee.
He recently said there would be football even if he has to suit up himself. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t seem it will come to that.
During an appearance on “The Paul Finebaum Show” on Monday, Gee discussed what would potentially happen should a player test positive for COVID-19 once football is allowed to return:
West Virginia President @gordongee offers thoughts on the possibility of a student-athlete testing positive for coronavirus when college sports resume: pic.twitter.com/ZOE0glYv26
— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) May 18, 2020
“I think we’re learning how to control it,” Gee said. “And one thing is that we need to get over the panic. We just need to be calm about this thing. It is here. It’s gonna deal with it. If one of our athletes — for example, we’re talking about football right now — if one of our athletes gets the coronavirus, we can’t just shut the whole thing down. We have to learn to control that part of what we’re doing.
“Someone is going to come down with coronavirus, let’s just be clear about it. But the question is how do we handle that? Do we have isolation rooms? Do we put them into quarantine? … Then the final thing, in terms of college football, is how do we make sure our own team and the visiting teams both are given all the opportunity to protect themselves from the virus, but also to be able to play the game in a safe environment.”
Having a player test positive for COVID-19 is a worst-case scenario for programs that hope to return, so we’ll see what sorts of procedures are put in place for that possibility.
Firing squad at dawn.
It would probably be a good idea to have a free week after the regular season ends and before the CCG’s are played to account for any games that were postponed. If a team has more than one, they will just have one less data point for the bowls and playoffs, unless the powers to be are good with a two week layoff.
Problem solved. Maybe ads are listening.
They are and feel the same way. So do the coaches.
Athletes are catching it now, bringing them back to campus is just going to get them tested. When an athlete tests positive they will get quarantined for 2 weeks and then be back at practice. If they stay home they will have a greater chance of catching it and they won’t know they have it till the become feel worse. No one is going to stop the public from catching the virus we just saw that didn’t work anywhere in the world, it just delayed what has to happen. Maybe some older coaches and administrators with ie. diabetes will have to stay locked up for a couple years, that’s about as radical as it’s going to get. 17 year olds all the way down to 1 year olds, accounted for .1% of the deaths from Covid 19. That means without testing and without medical staff looking for infected members of the community, 5,000 people in a given community had to die from this illness (not just catch it but die from it) before, statistically, one football player could die from it. It won’t happen to a football player faster because they are playing football, it will happen to one faster if they don’t monitor their health in a controlled environment. Yes everyone in the stadium and in the locker room will have to behave as if there is a cold/flu season going on. Oh my gosh, could we finally be learning to have some common sense about that as a society?
As usual, a couple of fair points obscured by misleading and false claims. For example there are entire countries that have been able to protect the public instead of delaying the ‘inevitable.’ Especially when compared to the US ‘response.’
But I guess it isn’t American to care about the truth, so whatever