Zimmer complaining about attendance at US Bank is as tone deaf as it is dangerous
Joe Johnson
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Zimmer bemoaning the lack of fans at US Bank is as tone dead as it is dangerous
Boo hoo.
It was announced this week that the Vikings won’t expand beyond the 250 VIP crowd size limit for the rest of the 2020/21 season. Why? Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock made of toilet paper rolls and hand sanitizer, you’ll know that the COVID pandemic is yet again pushing our healthcare infrastructure to its limits.
Multiple states have nearly maxed every available ICU bed, as Minnesota did last week, having a total of NINE open beds in the entire Twin Cities metro area.
https://m.startribune.com/twin-cities-icu-space-at-red-alert-as-virus-cases-hit-record/572970942/
Because of that, multiple states have had to airlift COVID patients to rural hospitals as they simply can’t keep up with a virus that hospitalizes about 20% of the people it infects.
As we’ve seen from former President Trump’s rallies, large gatherings can easily become “super spreader events”.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/10/31/coronavirus-trump-campaign-rallies-led-to-30000-cases-stanford-researchers-say.html
So, it makes sense that something as non-critical as football wouldn’t get special treatment, right?
Enter Mike Zimmer.
Minnesota Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer said the following regarding… The following:
Zimmer said:
“We kind of anticipated that that’s the way it was going to go. We weren’t getting much help from the governor,” said Zimmer. “That’s what the rules are, just like everything else this year with the COVID protocols and everything else. We’ll just deal with it and try to do our best.”
Minnesota Governor Walz said:
“While we have worked hard to develop a safe and responsible plan to bring back a limited number of fans, our decisions have been based on medical guidance with public health as the top priority. We take seriously Minnesota’s rising COVID infection rates and increasing hospitalizations and believe closing the final four home games to fans is the right decision to help protect our community,”
That shouldn’t be controversial, but this is 2020 so of course it is. But when you have a head coach of a league that even with their bubble protocol continues to have COVID scares (to the point that the league met THIS WEEK to affirm adding an eighth playoff team per conference should the season end prematurely thanks to COVID).
Leagues don’t just do that. The NFL has seen what has arguably been the biggest peak of COVID yet and added a contingency for that reason.
So, hearing Zimmer talk about “help”, to me is tone deaf (considering that a lot of the guys playing in 2020 (bubble guys that can’t opt out lest they lose their roster spot) probably don’t want to) as it is dangerous (as it’s talk like this that minimizes the scourge that is COVID, which is why things are as bad or worse with COVID as they’ve ever been).
Putting 70,000 people into a stadium, or any fraction of that, shouldn’t be near the top of anyone’s priority list and considering that the league is still putting these guys on the field, I’d say that Zimmer should count their blessings and stop complaining about things that just make them look bad.
But that’s just me.