The testing machines have arrived, and now players can get on-the-spot antigen results in 15 minutes or less, every day, as a sort of general screening. They’ll also get a more comprehensive PCR test swab once per week, or sooner if one of the quick tests comes up positive.
The sports people dubbed this system a “game-changer,” and if it works, they are right. “It’s like we just won the lottery,” UW coach Jimmy Lake said.
That is … awesome! Just imagine what a few of these machines could do for a school, or a day care center, or a fruit-picking operation in Eastern Washington. More to the point for the UW, imagine what it could do for their own students, who want to get back to chemistry labs or the photography studio or the library.
“Based on the protocols outlined within University of Washington COVID-19 Safe Start Phases, library buildings will remain closed,” school officials wrote in an update to students, who have started almost entirely online.
So football gets rapid testing, and is open. Libraries and chem labs and lecture halls don’t, so are closed.
This is no small thing. I looked up the plans for the fall chemistry courses at the UW, and even the hard-core hands-on lab sections are remote this quarter, according to the course schedule. Physical Chemistry Lab, Organic Chemistry, Biomolecular Analysis — these are all courses where you work with instruments directly in order to measure chemical reactions.
I was a chemistry major in college, and have no doubt kids can learn the theory of all just fine online. But a virtual lab simulation isn’t a full replacement for real chemistry any more than an Xbox video game is a stand-in for Saturdays at Husky Stadium.
Couldn’t rapid results testing be a game-changer for the chemistry students, too?
Reporting out of the Pac-12 meetings suggested the universities are acutely aware of this glaring disparity — and are worried about it, though maybe not for the reasons you’d think.
The principal hang-up here isn’t that other students necessarily deserve equality with football. It’s that people might realize that big-time college football is indistinguishable from a pro sport — and then we might have to pay the players.
In the UW’s defense, they found a potential path out of a jam that was threatening many millions of lost revenue. Rightly or not, there has also been intense pressure from the public to just play. So, here’s hoping the daily rapid football testing works, and that it’s then just as rapidly expanded to all the non-entertaining parts of our flagship university. Like, ahem, chemistry.
Also here’s hoping the Huskies go undefeated.
But the larger frustration is that had this pandemic been made a national focus, we could have already had tens of millions of rapid response tests available per day in America. Along with N95 masks, which we also don’t have, this could have put us well along to reopening schools and the economy, according to Harvard researchers.
We could all feel like we won the lottery.
Instead, eight months in, the news is that we’re still struggling to even get enough rapid testing into the pandemic’s ground zero, nursing homes. Compared to all that, choosing to fix football first sure seems like something straight out of the last days of the Roman empire.
