As I stated previously, 60% of all AAA midget teams have already been playing games, and that was a week ago, so the totals are now closer to 70-80%. That includes several of the CA clubs. I will say that there is a lot of extremely short sighted and reactionary nonsense that goes along with this. For example, some shrews who live in an area around the rink called the police to report that people were "tailgating" in the parking lot of a rink in a Maryland suburb. This was complete horseshit. Because the rink will not allow any spectators, people are having to suffice with sending a designated video person to stream the game on facebook live, youtube or periscope. In this case, a group of parents were watching the game on a monitor on the side of an RV.
So what does the local municipality do? Tell the rink that parents can no longer even PARK in the parking lot. So for practice, when dropping off your 7 year old for the u8 ADM, you are supposed to drop em at the door, and then drive a mile away, returning only when your kid's session is over. Needless to say, parents are livid over this nonsense, and asking where is the common sense and interest in the well being of the kids? Is hockey now "child care?" Meanwhile rinks that have the capacity to seat hundreds of spectators could very safely open to 25% of capacity, and still accommodate the parents who want to watch, while allowing for adequate social distancing. There are rinks in other states doing exactly that with no issues.
As for the Texas story, there are a lot of things left out of that story. Clearly the death of a young healthy coach is scary, but also a statistical anomaly, complicated by the taking of the sleeping pills. They have ruled his death accidental, caused by the sleeping pills having slowed his heart, and that issue complicated by Covid, which according to his family, they were not sure he actually had. Is there a lesson to be had? Don't take sleeping pills when you are very sick, whether that be the flu or any other sort of respiratory disease. I will go one more step and say that sleeping pills are in general really bad for you, and don't really even allow for restful sleep, because they suppress REM sleep. Yet I digress....
What we also don't know is whether or not the kids on the team in question, were going to the same school, as Texas schools reopened with In person instruction around the same time. For all we know, this was caught at school, not unlike the way kids routinely get the flu. I don't want to go out on a limb here, but with all the thousands of skates that have occurred for youth hockey players and figure skaters, and even beer league players, all we have is a handful of reported cases. How many hockey sessions are required before it's clear that your chances of getting Covid playing youth hockey aren't very high?
Where is the follow up on the Texas team? If all those kids were sick, how many of them now are fully recovered? How many passed it on to other members of their family? Is there a quarantine going on, and if so how many days into the quarantine are they? That would be actual reporting, but we probably won't get that information, because it isn't inflammatory enough. Only the story of the Typhoid Mary team, and how Covid killed their young 29 year old coach remains.