The Alligator Army Weekly Open Thread, Vol. CVI

If the Olympics are going to bow to coronavirus concerns, you need to prepare for college football to do the same.

The reported decision by the International Olympic Committee to postpone the 2020 Olympics — a Summer Games edition set to begin in Tokyo this July — and likely do so to 2021 is a reminder that things in the middle distance and further are not assured in a world beset by a deadly virus that the world’s sentient rules are struggling to control.

And so you should probably be preparing for the very possible chance that college football will not be played in 2020 at all.

It’s tempting to think that there is a reprieve coming after the self-isolation and social distancing and working from home and plumbing the depths of Netflix and cable TV that most Americans are being counseled or mandated to keep dealing with over the next few weeks. But the problem with fighting SARS-CoV-2 or coronavirus or “kung flu” or whatever you want to call our modern plague — yeah, some of the names are racist, but that’s so far besides the point that wasting oxygen on it seems especially stupid — is that we’re fighting uphill ... and against the wind.

It’s a virus. It lives in people and is carried by particulates in the air they expel — usually by coughing or sneezing, but maybe just by breathing, too. It lurks for days and then sometimes explodes in the lungs, sending people to hospitals and then to graves. It may lurk in apparently healthy people, too.

There is no vaccine, and there won’t be until we finish the months-long process of making sure whatever vaccine is developed won’t be damaging or lethal in its own right. There is no cure, no matter how many long nouns in capital letters appear in the President’s tweets. The care appears to be fairly good — but there are limits on how much of it is available, and it currently seems as though the limit comes well before the need, and care isn’t a cure.

The number of infected keeps rising everywhere a lockdown has not been in effect and nearly ironclad, and testing has not mitigated that rise. And the U.S. — and Florida, in particular — are not exactly pacing the pack in terms of lockdown efficacy and testing availability, either.

And so long as someone in the world is infected with coronavirus, everyone else — bar the inexplicably immune and the still-recovering — can get it.

There are ways to cut down our chances of contracting the virus. You know most of them, and I hope you’re following them. If we all take them, maybe we’ll flatten the curves and save lives ... and end up having to do the same in another six weeks, should another cluster of cases flare up somewhere.

Two such six-week cycles after the current one ends in April brings us to Week 2.

Don’t count on it happening, is all I’m saying.