If America Played Football Against Covid

It’s the end of the first quarter, our team is losing 208,000–0, and our head coach is stricken. Do we stay on our current game plan or try something new?

We Americans love our American Football games! We equally love our sports analogies to cheer on winning approaches too. So what if Team America played against Team Covid in a football game? How would we win and how could we lose?

First, the game stakes exceed good hot dogs, beer, and cheering our favorite team mascot. In the Covid match-up, 1–2 members of our ~50 person Team America would die every time we matched up. Ouch. And since the whole country is on our side, there’s a lot to lose in cases, side effects, and casualties. Consequential stakes for all of us football fans!

At game time, our team would NOT do some things: We would NOT stand still while Team Covid ran through us as a herd, having assumed our cause was lost. No way! Nor would we take the field for a fierce game without protective helmets and pads. No way! Our defensive team would NOT skip ‘zone defense’, the proven strategy to swarm hotspots with extra prevention to stop Team Covid intrusions. No way! Our coach would NOT surrender ‘man-on-man’ defense that could contact trace and stop incoming Covid receivers. No way! Our coach would NOT arrive without game strategy and would never say “It is what it is” after a bad tackle left Team America on the ground. No way! And we’d NEVER bring a badminton commentator to direct game day football strategy while blaming the other team for losing. No way!

We American football lovers would review such a list of NOT’s and cringe. We like winning and our team wouldn’t even consider such losing strategies. Yet with the Covid pandemic, Team America and our head coach’s head are stuck in denial while repeating a dead-on-arrival game plan. Too many fantasies persist like the proven false ‘herd’ mentality, mask denial, and tests-as-proof-of invincibility. Our impotent commander-in-chief instead chooses fake doctors and ignorant hacks against the relentless attacks of Team Covid.

Our winning Team America, in contrast, would employ experienced game doctors to organize our multi-prong strategy to win! Our Team America would suit up with the best masks & protective gear ready to defeat the formidable but vulnerable Team Covid. Our coach would apply Covid game data for hot spot isolation, contact tracing defense, and cooperative team coordination from ballboy to quarterback. He would marshal offense technologies to track, attack, and defeat the Covids while isolating threats actively. Team America’s winning coach would also motivate us about the real stakes of the game and how to win with character.

In short our Team America can win with a data-based strategy to defend strongly during mid-game while our motivated and vaccine-equipped team gears up for 2nd half offense. Candidly if the coach is losing 208,000–0 after the first quarter based on fantasy strategies that have our team standing still while the touch Covid team mows us down… it’s time for a big upgrade in coaches!

Now is the moment to adjust our game plan so that Team America can defeat Team Covid in the last three quarters of the game using our shared competitive spirit, smarts, and guts. The best teams around the world apply real defenses, real PPE, all suppliers coordinated and helping, concrete offenses employing meticulously planned team-wide technologies, and motivational tools to fire up our team. With new offense in vaccines and treatment on the way later in the game, there’s great hope to win if we step up our play. With strong leadership, Team America would rally to stop the fantasy prescriptions and sloppy play to compete at the level of football we know we’re capable of.

Go Team America; we can still defeat the dreaded Team Covid!

*Credit to the unnamed doctor on radio who tee’d up football as an analogy that I’ve run with.