Mason's Monolog

This week I want to touch on the MSHSL’s (Minnesota State High School League’s) decisions about sports for the 2020-2021 school year. An article printed elsewhere in this week’s edition of the paper covers the basic portion of their decisions, so I’m going to focus on my opinion on it.

I see the worry related to Covid and sports, and I’m happy they’re letting kids play sports this year. But I still get the feeling that this is way more complicated than it needs to be.

The way I see it, as much as it may scare some of you to hear this, in my opinion, if one kid shows up to school with Covid, most of the student body and staff in that building is going to catch it. The same thing happens with the common cold every winter. It seems to be just a given that it’s going to happen.

Take that information as you will, and even with a mask mandate in school, if they take education back to the classroom, you’ve easily got a thousand kids or more in the schools in this area. Smaller schools maybe would be a little safer considering the odds of someone having the virus and bringing it to school, but I’m not an expert in that field.

I’m not going to assume that kids going back to school is going to cause another outbreak, but I think sheltering everyone from the virus was a mistake. We don’t know if we’re dealing with just one strain or can you get Covid more then once? I don’t think it’s been around long enough for a lot of facts to be determined as of yet.

In my opinion, herd immunity is the best thing for us. They say you can’t catch some diseases a second time once you had them, like the chicken pox. There are different strains of the flu or a cold. Can you catch the same strain more then once? I’m not certain. I know you can catch a cold or get the flu several times in a season because there are different strains of them.

I feel for the elderly and immunocompromised, but for the virus to truly fizzle out, I feel that keeping people away from it is the worst thing we can do. If we continue on the path that we are on, I believe it’s just going to keep resurging and causing new outbreaks.

Whatever your views are on this issue, I’m sure of one thing that we can agree on—that the quicker this all goes away—the better. We all want things to go back to the way they were...don’t we?