Football's out. What's next?

Football’s being canceled left and right and basketball will surely follow. Why? Because people are scared. Are they justified? Not really. Don’t get me wrong, COVID can be quite deadly with the wrong people, but most of us aren’t the wrong people.

Swiss Policy Research put out a list of 30 COVID facts that everyone should read. Some of the highlights include this little factoid. If you’re of school age or working age the risk of your dying from COVID is about the same as your risk of dying on the car ride to work. Think about that. Your risk of dying on the way to work is obviously not zero, but it’s not enough to even concern you. Here’s something else they found. Up to 80 percent of all people who test positive will have no symptoms. In other words, while you’re freaking out over getting it, there’s a chance you’ve already had it never knew it.

Even with the higher risk age group of 70 to 79-year-olds, 60 percent remain symptom-free. They say about 95 percent of people who get this thing only suffer moderate symptoms or less.

Of course, it’s that 5 percent we need to worry about. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t see another study linking Vitamin D deficiency to serious symptoms of COVID. Vitamin D is so important for a wide swath of health-related issues, including your immune system. Why do we never hear Drs. Fauci and Birx urging you to get your Vitamin D checked? In fact, I went in for my yearly physical and asked my doctor if they were going to check my Vitamin D. He said they hadn’t planned on it, but they could. They did. Mine was very low. I’m now taking Vitamin D daily to try and get it back to a normal level.

Why is this not routine? Vitamin D is one of those essential things we should be checking, and it’s so easy to fix if your system is out of whack. It’s tied to so many ailments, yet doctors rarely recommend getting it checked, and no one on the national level has identified it as a possible complication with COVID, despite numerous studies.

Here’s something else from the Swiss Policy Research. The median age of people dying from COVID around the world is over 80. This is something we’ve known since the get-go, yet we continue to foolishly put COVID-positve patients back in nursing homes. In many countries, upwards of two-thirds of all the extra deaths occurred in nursing homes. Imagine if we took two-thirds of the deaths out of the count. This disease would not be nearly as scary. Unless you’re in a nursing home it’s very likely you’ll never die from it. 

In fact, it’s very unlikely that you’ll die from it period. While we’re looking at probably 200,000 or more deaths before this thing is done, well over 600,000 people die each year in the U.S. from heart disease. Same for cancer. Yet we don’t sit around in a panic over either of those diseases. I know, you can’t catch heart disease or cancer, but remember that first stat. If you’re school age or working age you have a better chance of dying on your way to work than dying from COVID.

So, what’s my point? My point is we have to go back to our lives. College-age football players have virtually no chance of dying from this. Canceling football unduly adds to the panic. Stop it. Just stop it. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.