I put this in the wrong thread, but the cancel culture needs to fucking stop. Athletes in their prime physical condition without symptoms and we are cancelling shit left and right. Just play the damn game and push back. There's always going to be a "variant" or some sort of illness that you could cancel events for.
So are we going to do this every winter then? Every winter, sickness goes around. There's always going to be a variant and rona isn't going away ever. So let's just cancel everything then?
We all understand your frustration, but Max makes a good point. I slept at a Holiday Inn and Omicron was discovered at Lancet Laboratories here, where my pathology prof wife practices. The incidences per 1000 cases is a bit lower but Omicron is killing people and putting them in hospital. A problem is that it affects the elderly and young most adversely and young athletes are among the high risk categories.
An important problem is that people carrying the Omicron virus are more likely to have minor symptoms or no symptoms when compared to other coronaviruses. This fact, and the fact that the mutation transmits much more rapidly, makes Omicron a much greater threat to young athletes than even the Delta variant.
May I also add that Omicron did not originate in South Africa. For example, after the announcement, the Dutch found that it had been missed for more than a month before South Africa alerted the world to the problem.
Omicron was first identified in South Africa because the related medical technologies and modeling are more highly advanced in South Africa than most other countries and there is a high threat to the general population because of the relatively higher incidence of HIV in poorer segments of the population. That is why South Africa also found the delta variant first, although it probably originated in India, where it did its most damage.
The coronavirus is not the flu. College athletics is a minor, a very minor, thing when compared to the threat of holding a super-spreader event and putting so many lives at risk.
