Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is calling for a two-week suspension of in-person high school classes and all youth sports.
On Friday, Whitmer called for a voluntary suspension of in-school classes, youth sports, and indoor dining in response to a surge in new coronavirus cases.
“We have to do this together. Lives depend on it, ” Whitmer said during a news conference. “We’re going to have some tough weeks ahead. So I’m asking everyone — please, take this seriously.”
Michigan’s current Covid surge has the state’s leadership in a panic.
“As of Thursday, Michigan had the worst rate of new Covid-19 cases in the U.S. over the previous two weeks,” NBC reported. “Related hospitalizations had more than quadrupled in a month and were 90 percent of the statewide peak from a year ago, leading some hospitals to postpone non-emergency surgeries. The seven-day average of new daily deaths has been rising for two weeks.”
However, the connection between youth sports and surging coronavirus numbers seems tenuous at best.
As Breitbart’s Warner Todd Huston reports, “The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health recently published a study following the health of 30,704 high school athletes who played a sport this past fall, and the study revealed just how useless a lockout of sports would have been as a preventive measure.”
Huston continued:
The study revealed that the high school athletes participated in 16,898 practices and 4,378 games during the state’s fall schedule. But the transmission rate was not worrisome in the least. In fact, the rate of transmission among the high school athletes (32.6 cases per 100,000 person-days) was even lower than that of the general population of 14-17-year-old Wisconsin residents (38.1 cases per 100,000 person-days). Further, there seemed to be no statistical difference in transmission rates between contact and non or low-contact sports.
For now, Whitmer is not making the in-school or youth sports suspensions mandatory.