It’s Football Season In Florida And Elsewhere, And Time For The "Superspreaders" That Weren’t

The COVID-19 doomsayers have been wrong about so much. The effectiveness of lockdowns and masks, the virus’ threat to children, the likeliness of

The COVID-19 doomsayers have been wrong about so much.

The effectiveness of lockdowns and masks, the virus’ threat to children, the likeliness of how it spread on surfaces and during air travel, just to name a few.

We can now add college football to that list – at least in Florida, which, according to DeSantis-hating liberals, is Ground Zero for the global COVID crisis.

Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida, recently reported on this phenomenon, which appears to defy the definition of news, since it’s something that didn’t happen – despite the absence of masking requirements, social distancing, and vaccines among one-third of the people under 64.

“College football stadiums across Florida with tens of thousands of non-masked, screaming students and boosters packed closely together have so far resulted in no recognizable community outbreaks amid the pandemic, according to infection figures on the state’s biggest campuses,” FTF noted.

“The season began amid fears that big games could become superspreader events. Now, nearly halfway through the season — which kicked off as the highly infectious delta variant was still spreading across the U.S. — the days and weeks after home games showed no significant surges on college campuses.”

“Have crowded college football stadiums turned out safer than everyone expected?” the article continued.

The data suggested the answer was yes – despite the claims of people like Steve Kirn, a leader in the union that represents college faculty, who had noted that school were taking “the risk of packing the stadium, and saying that whoever gets sick is tolerable or if they die that’s tolerable because the game matters more.”

Three weeks ago, after the Gators hosted the Alabama Crimson Tide in a 90,000-fan sellout, UF, a school of 53,000 students, tested more than 5,400 people. A grand total of 99 people tested positive.

Florida State tested nearly 2,800 people two weeks after the Seminoles hosted Notre Dame last month. Eighty-eight came back positive.

The University of South Florida in Tampa, another school of more than 50,000 students that played its home opener against the Gators on Sept. 11, reported just 103 positives up to two weeks after the game.

The University of Central Florida, yet another 50,000-plus student campus, played Boise State on Sept. 2. Over the next two weeks, just 289 tested positive.

“In interviews,” the FTF article noted, “health experts offer possible explanations: higher-than-expected vaccination numbers; fans who already contracted the virus; a coincidental national decline in delta cases since mid-September; lack of robust contact-tracing that might be skewing numbers; and inconsistent testing across campuses that might be suppressing figures even among students who feel sick after games.”

Statewide, according to the state Department of Health, the number of new cases overall fell 80 percent between Aug. 27, just before football season started, and Oct. 7. Over that time, the positivity rate statewide has dropped 70.

And that came during a period when major colleges and Florida’s three NFL franchises were playing before tens of thousands of people.

In fact, as the conservative site National Review pointed out this week, the outcome has been the same for other parts of the country after Michigan, Tennessee, Georgia Tech, Texas and Virginia Tech played.

Perhaps the vaccines work as many experts suggest. Perhaps we’ve underestimated the effectiveness of natural immunity.

Or perhaps, as with other events, such as numerous Black Lives Matter protests last year, which COVID fearmongers were OK with, or the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, which in August drew more than 500,000 bikers and led to fewer than 200 positives spread across five states afterward, our so-called experts were just wrong – again.