The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

I'm not really sure what should be done.

I think, at this stage, it makes sense not to allow players to play that have tested positive for a communicable disease.

However, you have cases like the Football Team where there are 21 players that have positive cases.  That's not sustainable.  It looks like we will be dealing with some form of COVID potentially indefinitely, so what's the best way to handle it?

I think that teams probably should mandate (or at the very, very least heavily pressure the way they do with "voluntary workouts") players to get vaccinated and boosted or whatever, just to reduce the chances that there are outbreaks on their team.

Are you allowed to play if you have the Flu?  I can see why the NFL would have a rule where you aren't allowed to.  There's nothing super weird about that.

I guess all you can do is stay the course and try to get your protocols up to prevent outbreaks in your locker room.

Unless I am wrong, it seems like everyone or a very large percentage testing positive right now are vaccinated, so that isn't helping. We really should just look at the data and try not to make it emotional or political, NFL players are amongst the healthiest in the world. Their chances of getting very ill from Covid is basically zero. The vaccinated are spreading this just as much as the unvaccinated, so like you said, something must be done and it shouldn't be more of the same.

My opinion is to just let them all play. Based on data, the vaccine seems to help prevent people from being very ill so the coaches and others who are more susceptible to it can choose to be vaccinated if they want to or deal with the consequences if they aren't. Like the data says, EVERYONE is spreading it so the vaccine means nothing in term of not affecting others.

I can't in good conscience condone force people to take this vaccine if they don't want to based on the fact that it doesn't prevent spreading it to others. We don't know the long term affects of this and there is no legal recourse if you get seriously hurt from it now or down the line. Just look at what is happening in European soccer (football for you non Yanks). Heart issues and collapses all over the field and those guys are even healthier than NFL players.

Covid is going to be around for many more years after this and current protocols aren't working, so doing what hasn't been working until 2030 is not a reasonable option to me.

They basically should ignore it at this point.   At least 95% of the players are vaccinated and COVID is not going to kill young men in their 20s and 30s in top physical shape.

The unvaccinated are definitely spreading it more than the vaccinated.

Also the unvaccinated are clogging up hospitals preventing others from needed care. 

I can in good conscience mandate vaccine for all absent that have a policy of only treating unvaccinated if the hospitals have spare capacity.  If no spare capacity than the unvaccinated can go to the farm store and eat cattle dewormer.

I don't mean to sound like a dick, but yes, you are wrong about that.

It is helping, but it's not stopping 100%.  Getting vaccinated will reduce (but not eliminate) catching COVID.  Once you have COVID, it will reduce (but not eliminate) symptoms, severity, length of illness.  And it will reduce (but not eliminate) viral load that will reduce (but not eliminate the chance) of spreading it to someone else.

Vaccines and boosters definitely help reduce the spread, but also helps these guys clear the COVID list faster and get back on the field or have no symptoms.

I think you're right about making apolitical medical decisions, but there's a PR issue here, too.  The NFL is a national product with an image to uphold.  Right now, about 1300 people are dying per day from COVID in the US.  Some parts of the country are obviously worse than others, but I think it would be a bad look to just ignore it and keep playing.

I also think it's probably a legal impossibility, to have a guy who you know has tested positive, send him out there -- what if the player across from him gets really sick? -- he could certainly sue the NFL for unsafe working conditions, I'd imagine.

At this point in the evolution of the virus, I just don't see how you knowingly send guys out there to play who are known to be positive.  Not when people are still dying at a very large rate.

I think that the current rules with the thing about pressuring all players to be vaccinated, in order to move games in emergency situations, makes the most sense.

Two words in response to your idea of a vaccine mandate for all..... Second Amendment

This is so not true. Fully vaccinated countries like Gibralter and Israel have had to shut down because of Covid. Fully vaccinated cruises are getting covid. No unvaccinated people to blame. It really doesn't matter if you have the vaccine or not you can and will spread it if you get it and do not take precautions.

We just need to learn to live with it. If you are a professional athlete whose team depends on you then you're going to need to take more precautions during the season than some construction worker who is a single hermit. Pretending vaccines are the answer is just taking away from the reality of the situation and creating other issues.  

Fortunately the new variant doesn't affect the lungs and is much milder so at least that's a good thing.

Tom Pelissero is reporting that the majority of NFL players want to abolish the protocols seeing as how most are asymptomatic. My nephew informed me a few months ago that his hospital quit testing employees a long time ago because they were tired of sending home staff who never showed symptoms. Basically they only test people who are showing signs and it looks like that's what the players want to do.

As of November 17th, 94.3% of NFL players were vaccinated. So, unless you mean the population of the country and not just the NFL, then this is vaccinated players spreading it to vaccinated players. I believe the number is even higher now at 97%. The country is far lower than that but that changes from state to state. I think Omicron spreads easier to the vaccinated but is far less milder.

What everyone in charge seemed to ignore from Day 1 for one reason or another, is demographics. Like I said, NFL players don't get sick. Covid to them is either asymptomatic or a cold because of how good their conditioning is. Grandma and Grandpa got sick and sadly passed on, as did the obese. These don't apply to most professional athletes and should be taken into account. There is no perfect solution, no one size fits all and I hear what you are saying. If I'm a Defensive End, I would want to know if the Right Tackle has Covid or not, even if I am not personally too worried about it. But, Covid to me won't be going away for years, if at all, so postponing games and pretending that these guys are in danger is not the answer.

What is? I don't know but yelling at each other is all this country has been doing and that hasn't worked out too well.

^ And how many of those faked their vaccine status?

If you read the comments on literally any YouTube video about the virus, you'd think nothing should be done about the virus.     

I just got my booster shot today, and still have a good chance of getting Covid with this new variant that spreads quickly; but at least the vaccine will hopefully minimize the virus if I get it.

As for everybody else I don't care whether you get vaccinated or not, it's your life and your decision.

Just football talking heads but they were saying yesterday that the omicron variant was fairly mild and was passing through pretty quickly for most guys.

My youngest and I just tested positive for covid. I was scheduled to get my booster today, my youngest had just gotten his first dose (but probably not in time for it to make any difference). Really, really lousy timing with family scheduled to visit for xmas. We don't get to see that part of the family often and the plan was for them to be here for a week. Not sure what the heck we'll do. Symptoms are very mild for my son (basically just a headache and runny nose) and not too bad for me. I was hit with classic man-flu symptoms yesterday, but I'm much better today and working from home. The rest of the family is vaccinated and tested negative. We're basically quarantined in half the house while we figure out what to do. If everyone else keeps testing negative, I might take my son and go somewhere else until we're in the clear.

Hopefully it passes quickly for you guys. My wife's cousin who is 52 caught it at the Jags-Titans game last week. She got the Regeneron thing once she tested positive and only had one really bad day.

We're still mostly dealing with Delta at this point.

I'm hoping Omicron is more virulent but less deadly.  That would be pretty big, because it would squeeze Delta out. 

But the bad part is that Omicron is more resistant to vaccine, in terms of catching it -- still reduces, but not as much as the vaccine vs. the other variants.  Vaccine + booster is doing very well as prevent serious illness though, still, which is ultimately what matters most.

And we're learning still.  We don't have our own data yet -- I think we're relying on South Africa info, if I'm not mistaken.

There's absolutely no question Omicron is more virulent. How much is the question. The early reports that it was maybe milder were from South Africa where the age profile is completely different than in the West. The latest out of the UK is that there's no reason (yet) to believe it to be milder, but since disease severity data lags initial positive tests by several weeks, it's still very early.

If you want an indication of virulence, you can look at a place like Copenhagen in Denmark. They variant test every single positive PCR sample, so they can tell with very high precision exactly what the development is. On 27 Nov they detected the first 3 Omicron cases out of about 4000 total cases (less than 0.1%). A week later it was 1.5% of all cases. A week after that it was 15% of all cases. A week later (about now) it's 50%. Copenhagen has a heavily vaccinated population and since Omicron can infect the vaccinated to a much greater degree, it's not quite that simple to calculate the relative virulence (since Omicron effectively has a *much* larger pool of people to spread in), but it's clearly more virulent. Recent UK data indicates vaccine (2 doses) efficacy around 0-20%, with booster around 55%-80%, although that data might be affected by the time lapsed since vaccination (basically, most people in the UK had their second shot 6 months ago, so protection *now* is bad, but we don't know what it is for people who *just* got a second shot).

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/uncertainty-swirls-around-omicron-covid-19-severity

I saw on one of the weekend news shows that for every one person that catches omicron that they are spreading it to four other individuals, and then those four spread it to another four; so it can ramp up the cases pretty quickly.

the timing for my family worked out ok .. my kid got vaccinated the first day it was available for 9 year olds so it's been about 3 weeks since his 2nd dose .. and i had my booster over a month ago and so did my wife.

I did have a cold about 2 weeks ago and was sick for about a week, so it may have been a breakthrough but it never got to the point where i had fever and it was mostly cough/sniffles so I was just careful and didn't go out or get exposed to people.

I'm kinda coming around to the idea of moving past asymptomatic positive tests like CF is saying, but I need a little more data.

Omicron took over super fast.  Shortly after I wrote my last message, it had taken over as the dominant variant in the US.  I saw somewhere that it only killed like...1 person.  If it's really low death rate and the symptoms are way less, we can probably start look at "living with the virus" like we have talked about.

I'm just not 100% comfortable making that assumption yet.

The cases in FL are blowing up again, but if the death/hospitalization doesn't follow, this might be the break we're looking for.

^ yeah, it would be nice if a significantly milder variant took over and became dominant.

^ that's generally how these things go

NBA comish nailed it yesterday. It isn't going anywhere and we just have to learn to live with it.

Adam Schefter  just reported that the players union are about to sign an agreement to lowering quarantine for Covid to 5 days for all players regardless of vaccination status.

Maybe they should only test players that are showing symptoms