President Trump, along with college football players and coaches, pushed university presidents to salvage the upcoming sports season as reports came out that several conferences might cancel their games.
“The student-athletes have been working too hard for their season to be cancelled,” Trump said Monday, adding the hashtag #WeWantToPlay.
Trump also retweeted Clemson University quarterback Trevor Lawrence, one of several high-profile athletes who has been advocating for the return of college football in the fall despite worries that the move would place student-athletes at risk.
The Big Ten and Pac-13 conferences have already decided to cancel the 2020 season, according to sportscaster Dan Patrick, and will make the formal announcement on Tuesday. The ACC and Big 12 are “on the fence,” and the SEC “is trying to get teams to join them for a season.” Iowa and Nebraska are the only two schools in the Big 10 that voted to play the season as planned, Patrick reported.
Earlier Monday, Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, sent a letter to the Big 10 league presidents imploring them to resume the season as normal.
“Life is about tradeoffs,” Sasse wrote. “There are no guarantees that college football will be completely safe — that’s absolutely true; it’s always true. But the structure and discipline of football programs is very likely safer than what the lived experience of 18- to 22-year-olds will be if there isn’t a season.”
“This is a moment for leadership,” Sasse added. “These young men need a season. Please don’t cancel college football.”
The Florida health department reported that 3,355 people were admitted to Florida hospitals from Aug. 2 to Aug. 9, a new record in weekly COVID-19 hospitalization rates. More than 620 people were admitted to hospitals last Wednesday alone, according to the Orlando Sentinel. As of Monday, 30,505 people have been admitted to Florida hospitals for COVID-19 treatment. The rate of daily hospitalizations has spiked since June. The average number of new patients hospitalized each day went from 207 in the span of June to mid-July and increased to a daily average of 447 since mid-July.
The American Academy of Pediatrics reported that 97,078 children in the United States tested positive for the coronavirus between July 16-30, a 40% increase in child cases. Some of the nation’s largest school districts, such as Los Angeles and Houston, have decided it’s too risky to reopen schools for in-person instruction.
While children are less likely to experience severe illness from coronavirus infection, they could still be asymptomatic carriers, putting teachers and staff at risk. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, however, announced last week that New York City schools could reopen for in-person learning next month as the state’s coronavirus infection rate has remained below 3%, a safety threshold put forth by the World Health Organization.
Trump said during his Monday press briefing that the number of infections should not give school districts pause when constructing their reopening plans and schedules for in-person and virtual classes.
“It’s a tiny fraction of death, a tiny fraction, and they get better very quickly,” Trump said. “They may have it for a short period of time, but as you know, the seriousness of it in terms of what it leads to is extraordinarily small.”
Democrats and Republicans have not scheduled new negotiations on a coronavirus aid package two days after Trump took executive actions meant to extend federal unemployment insurance benefits at $400 per week, defer student loans interest-free, institute a payroll tax holiday, and to avoid rental evictions.
“I’d hoped the Senate would be spending this week turning a major agreement into law,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor Monday. “But sadly for the country, sadly for struggling Americans, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the Senate Democratic leader decided we would not deliver any of that.”
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said Trump’s executive actions are not sufficient to address the needs created by the ongoing pandemic. The payroll tax, he said, would have to be reimbursed later, which lowers the likelihood that businesses will partake in it.
“President Trump’s recent executive orders are so unserious in terms of meeting the large needs of the American people as to be pathetic,” Schumer said.
Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, along with Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, are pushing for a nationwide lockdown to stem the spread of COVID-19. A six-week lockdown, they say, “could almost stop the viral fire that has swept across this country over the past six months and continues to rage out of control.”
“We can continue to allow the coronavirus to spread rapidly throughout the country or we can commit to a more restrictive lockdown, state by state, for up to six weeks to crush the spread of the virus to less than one new case per 100,000 people per day,” they wrote in a New York Times op-ed.
They added that state leaders “gave up” on lockdown measures that could save thousands of lives. The U.S. is unlikely to go back into a lockdown that caused so many business closures and millions of unemployment claims in the spring.
The U.S. leads all other countries in terms of confirmed COVID-19 cases, with more than 5 million confirmed infections. More than 163,000 people in the U.S. have died due to COVID-19, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
