There have been several concerns across the sports world regarding the Coronavirus or COVID-19. Multiple leagues across the world have begun to cancel/postpone sporting events. A more used approach is that they’re planning to play games with no fans in attendance. Only team personnel and a small amount of media will be available in locker rooms and on the floor. This morning the city of San Francisco announced that there can be no events with over 1000 people in attendance. Olympic events are beginning to be canceled as well. As the days go by, it’s getting easier to see how serious this pandemic is getting.
There is a select few amount of people who think that the virus isn’t serious and that the fact that games are getting canceled is ridiculous. To those people I say, please be safe and stay hygienic and sanitized. It’s easy to make light of something until it happens to someone of importance to you or yourself. Take it with a grain of salt. As far as we know, if the virus can be contained and civilians do not go out in public while contaminated, it could be better treated from a medical standpoint. It’s basically a situation where it’s one season versus the health and welfare of these players that travel from country to country and all over the world.
There has been a developing situationZ occurring within the CBA. COVID-19 surfaced overseas and on February 3rd, they made the decision to postpone the season until March. From there, the plan was to decide whether to postpone or to go through with the season. The CBA has called for its players who evacuated last month to return because they’ve opted to continue on with the season. I’d assume that they’d follow suit and play with minimal attendance at games. The problem here is that no one wants to return due to the fact that there has been 80,000+ confirmed cases of the virus so far and 3,000+ deaths. Also there are 16,000+ active cases still ongoing. I’d be remiss to acknowledge that there have been 61,000 people to recover, but there’s still a great cause for concern. The CBA is penalizing players who are leaning towards not returning by handing out lifetime bans and a multiple-year suspension on league-agency licenses. I personally believe that under these circumstances, that this is an incredibly harsh way to deal with this situation.
Above The Rim 