Thursday afternoon in Columbus, we were set to see Penguins vs. Blue Jackets. By Thursday night, the NHL season would be 'paused.'
Friday afternoon in Bradenton, the Pirates and Blue Jays were playing Grapefruit ball. By Friday evening, all major professional sports leagues declared they'd be done for at least three weeks.
And those, it turns out, were the good old days.
Because by yesterday, at 9:06 p.m., the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued this stark statement:
New: Starting immediately and for the next 8 weeks, CDC recommends cancelling all events of 50 or more people. Full recommendation here: https://t.co/LrjUt4rl7B #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/OroIqhTYJo
— CDC (@CDCgov) March 16, 2020
Two months.
Then, at 10:10 p.m., the country's preeminent NBA reporter poster-ized us with this:
ESPN story on NBA owners and executives preparing for a minimum three month hiatus — and awaiting league office’s projections on financial damage. https://t.co/BX6WsDSRXQ
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) March 16, 2020
Three months.
Do I hear four? How about a full year? Could this outlast WALL-E and the cockroaches of nuclear winter?
Really, it's hard to fathom any of this, and that's without even touching the surreal scene we're about to witness on this Monday morning in the form of a post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh. For anyone who missed it, both our state and county governments declared a two-week closure of all businesses deemed 'non-essential,' meaning most everything beyond groceries, gas stations and pharmacies. And this on top of banning more than 50 people being in any one location.
The sidewalks, roads and bridges were mostly silent yesterday, even in the typically vibrant Strip, where my wife Dali and I took a long stroll, but this will be ... wow, it'll be a ghost town.
I'm trying really hard to stay focused on sports here, and I'll get there just below. But I'd feel remiss right now if I didn't share this plea anew: Let's get this over with.
I want to see Jake Guentzel using that shoulder to celebrate goals.
I want to see Josh Bell circling the bases.
I want to see the Steelers welcome a new running back to the South Side.
And I don't want to wait until June, July, August ... Christmas, whatever.
Infinitely more important, to reiterate from late last week, which now feels like a year ago in coronavirus time, I want to see all of us, as a city, as a country, as a planet, emerge from this as unscathed as we can. With the least possible loss of health, loss of jobs and, above all, loss of life.
Some of that's out of our control. We're still waiting on the various levels of government, as well as private enterprise, to produce the test kits we need. And we'll be waiting a good while longer, it's clear, for the medical community to come through with treatments and, ultimately a vaccine. Not much we can do on those fronts.
At the same time, as any health/science expert will attest, we also can make literally the biggest impact.
Read this:
Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to "flatten the curve" https://t.co/yDJnTMuWS3
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 15, 2020
I'm serious. Stop right here, click that Washington Post link, and read it top to bottom.
It's being passed around all across the Internet, and there's a reason for that: It describes, better than anything I've read anywhere, what it means to 'flatten the curve,' a phrase I'm sure most have heard by now. It details how the simple act of avoiding large groups can immensely diminish the speed with which the virus spreads and, as a result, how that helps our medical community -- we've got all of 933,000 hospital beds in America, most of them already occupied -- avoid the kind of overload that's currently crushing Italy.
Don't be ignorant, applying that term literally.
Worse, don't be one of these idiots, seen Saturday night outside Carson City Saloon on the South Side:
Two presumed positive cases of coronavirus were announced in #Pittsburgh today - but that is definitely not stopping the St. Patrick’s Day festivities. Here’s a look at Carson Street on the South Side. @TribLIVE pic.twitter.com/8JDYepBhEi
— Teghan Simonton (@teghan_simonton) March 14, 2020
Even casual reading over the past couple of days would've informed anyone that it was exactly gatherings like these -- big numbers in small, enclosed spaces -- that brought dramatic spikes to the infected in places like South Korea, which is why those were banned immediately there. (Here, we waited out the weekend for some insane, inexplicable reason for which Mayor Bill Peduto will long be answering should this prove a sequel.)
This is stupid, selfish behavior. Those people might as well have been coughing in the faces of their parents or grandparents.
News flash: This isn't about you.
News flash II: This isn't about 'freedom,' as I've heard from some on the stupid, selfish side. There's no such thing when it comes to crises. If there were, we'd never have had anyone drafted to fight a war. Don't conflate the common welfare with some Constitutional crisis. It's insulting to anyone's intelligence.
News flash III: This isn't about the business owners.
There are so many ways to help the many who'll suffer through this, including those at restaurants, bars and the hospitality industry that'll be hardest hit. Ideally, bailouts or other relief will come. Immediately, we can still order food and order products from our local businesses rather than Amazon or whatever. Feed the ones who feed you. Lift up a brother or sister.
But trying to do so now -- or claiming that's the reason for jamming a place like the one above -- is only doing greater damage. Because the sooner we get this over with, the sooner those businesses and all of us will be back on our collective feet.
Be smarter. Be better.
And before long, we'll be watching, Jake and J.B. again, even as we divide blame for this whole damned mess somewhere between Jack Johnson, Mike Tomlin and Bob Nutting.
• More on the above from our TV partners at WPXI:
• Full applause to the NFL for the full go on the new league year starting on time Wednesday with the opening of free agency. I've read/heard some weird whining about how it'd be inappropriate for players to be getting gazillions of dollars at a difficult time, but the fact is, the only people who'd be paying attention are sports fans, and they kind of grasped a long time ago they'd never make as much as Javon Hargrave's about to get. Big whoop.
Give us sports news. Anything. Please.
• Give us the NFL Draft, too. Right when it's scheduled, April 23-25. No delay. It's five weeks away.
Besides, having fans in Las Vegas watching the event means nothing next to what the enjoyment could mean for the rest of us. The NFL can't be the only league that tries to get through this with zero loss in attendance or revenue. All 32 teams conduct their own drafts from their own cities' headquarters, and all the rest is conducted by phone.
Oh, and Roger Goodell can hug himself after each selection.
• Today's the day Bud Dupree gets his tag. Let's all remember, when we're stoked the Steelers are keeping him, that Bud getting tagged in any setting that wasn't a middle-school playground was utterly inconceivable a year ago.
• Ben Cherington's expected to reach out to reporters by phone from Bradenton today, updating a bunch of stuff related to the Pirates. It'll be good to hear from him again. We hooked up briefly last week, before all this blew up, and it was easy to tell he was pumped about coming up to Pittsburgh and getting going ... in his own way. He's not the most outwardly emotional sort.
• One question I'll have: Are the Pirates still separating the 40 or so major-leaguers still down there from the minor-leaguers, if only to operate in smaller, more controllable settings?
The Yankees, one of the other teams that's chosen to stay in Florida, had a minor-leaguer test positive yesterday, but it's not expected to impact the main camp, as that's held in a separate facility. Same is true of the Pirates, though it's even more extreme. Where the Yankees train on one large complex in Tampa, the Pirates' major-leaguers are at LECOM Park, the few remaining minor-leaguers 7 miles to the south at Pirate City.
• That New York minor-leaguer is the first known coronavirus case in baseball. His name hasn't been disclosed.
• Still nothing from the Penguins, though that won't stop us from original, inside reporting, as Taylor Haase illustrates with a terrific set of interviews with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton players about their lives in limbo. Must-read stuff.