You'll stop watching hockey if they test individuals not displaying symptoms less? (Which is what the NFL did) Or perhaps allow asymptomatic players to return more quickly than the 10 days?
Both of those seem perfectly reasonable to me.
Asymptomatic spread is not the same danger is was last year. We're dealing with a population in the NHL that's almost entirely vaccinated, which reduces a lot of the spread. This is a less severe variant and has produced more asymptomatic cases than previously observed. Individuals who never develop symptoms shed less virus than pre-symptomatic cases.
You mentioned risk to the public and public interest. Where are these players interacting with the public? When traveling with their teammates and staff, or when they're home during Christmas? If your concern is a chain of asymptomatic infections getting to a high-risk person, the league taking longer to start up only seems to worsen that issue to me. And regardless, I don't think a sample of 600 individuals is driving public risk in any way.
The cancellations are kicking the can down the road. It's not like these players are hunkering down with the time off. They're going to bars, seeing people outside the team, and just generally f***ing off. Being with the team is probably the safest thing to do, and the more they wait, the more cases they'll have.
Like I said, the NHL is either going to have to adopt the mentality of "only worry about it if they're actually sick" or just call the season. Those are going to be the realistic choices.
according to the medical experts, if you have Covid or test positive, as long as you have the vaccine or the vaccine and booster, I believe the quarantine time is less as well. I wanna say I heard the talking heads on the idiot box say it’s 5 days for fully vaxxed people as opposed to the standard 10-14 days from last season.
But you’re right, their current system blows. I don’t know if Canada Is making it that much harder, but whatever the case is, they need to figure something out.
It’s not as if the virus is just going to stop spreading if everyone gets a vaccine. Obviously there’s millions of cases of people who have the vaccine/booster and still have covid or are asymptomatic and feel normal and just keep spreading it around the population.
You can’t expect all these guys that feel normal in their mid/young 20s and 30s going to all these different cities for 2-3 days at a clip to just sit in their hotel rooms the entire time before practice or a game.
The problem is even bigger when their home like you said because they are going about their normal everyday lives- going grocery shopping, getting dry cleaning, going to the mall, out to dinner/lunch, all the shit people do when they have free time.
So they get a test, let’s say it’s positive. But they’ve already been going for multiple places for days either being a carrier or a spreader asymptomatically.