Ready or not, big-time college football is back at State College. The pandemic, on the other hand, has never left.
Penn State will play its home opener Saturday against Ball State University at the football mecca that is Beaver Stadium, and the university says it has already sold more than 100,000 seats for what will be the first full-capacity game since before the coronavirus pandemic.
Does that scare you?
On the plus side, Pennsylvania is a state where about 56 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, which runs a little higher than the national average. And for the first time since the Fourth of July, the running seven-day average of new COVID cases nationally has just begun to fall from a Sept. 1 peak.
On the down side, COVID-19 new case rates in Pennsylvania alone - fueled by the delta variant - are running more than four times higher than they were in September 2020, at a time when Penn State and its Big Ten peers had temporarily decided not to have a fall football season. (They eventually did play games last fall, but no tickets were sold to the general public.)
All of which makes Saturday’s grand reopening a bit of a fingers-crossed moment.
As State College Mayor Ron Filippelli told PennLive in an interview this week, hotels, restaurants and retailers are rejoicing at the return of football.
“We’re happy that the town is alive again. That the local businesses are starting to profit from visitors coming in and students being here... And the football game will add to that because it’s going to bring in, I don’t know, probably sixty to seventy thousand people from outside that are going to come into the borough and hopefully shop and eat in the restaurants and stay in the hotels and so on,” Filippelli said.
“The bad piece of it is... I think there’s a considerable amount of concern among the permanent residents of the area, for obvious reasons.”
Filippelli was referring, of course, to the pandemic.
Penn State is doing what most Power Five football schools around the nation, including Alabama and Ohio State, are doing so far this year: Putting every seat in the stadium up for sale; opening the doors to all-comers, whether vaccinated against COVID-19 or not; and requiring mask-wearing only in enclosed, indoor areas of the stadium.
Others will be encouraged to voluntarily mask up.
In addition, Deputy Director of Athletics Scott Sidwell told reporters this week, Penn State has taken other mitigation steps to prevent long game-day lines like opening the stadium gates to fans earlier, expanding the entrance gates and moving to digital ticketing.
“The university is focused on consistently monitoring the state of the pandemic and has contingency plans in place should circumstances change and further mitigation measures are needed,” added Penn State spokesman Wyatt DuBois.
There are others who see the lack of a vaccine / test check at such a crowded venue as an abdication of responsibility.
“Venues at which vaccinated individuals are exclusively present are going to be much safer, especially when you’re talking about something where people do not socially distance; where they scream, yell and cheer, which all increases the risk of transmission,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security.
“I think that Penn State has a responsibility to the community... to say when we have these mass gatherings, we’re going to do them in the safest manner possible.”
The vaccination requirement debate has been reverberating around Penn State since the end of the last school year.
To this point, the school has decided not to mandate vaccines for all students or staff. It has been encouraging vaccines with various incentive programs, and it is also requiring unvaccinated students to submit to weekly COVID tests to attend classes in-person.
The university believes its way has proven successful.
DuBois told PennLive Thursday that at University Park, 83 percent of students and 87 percent of faculty and staff are fully vaccinated.
Vaccine proponents, however, have argued that even a negative test requirement for football fans would have a cascading impact on the community’s safety.
For example, even though most fans will be outside for most of the time on Saturday, in the after-game hours much of that stadium crowd is likely to move indoors into bars, restaurants and other places with big screens to talk about what they just saw, and watch the next batch of games.
Yet even as case counts are much higher right now than they were last September, the tight statewide capacity and service rules in place last year for Pennsylvania bars and restaurants were lifted by Gov. Tom Wolf as of Memorial Day.
If the stadium was more vaccine-proofed, Adalja said, that could make the bars and restaurants safer too.
Last week, a group of Penn State faculty who have been calling for a mandatory vaccination policy released a position paper calling on the university to require proof of vaccines or negative COVID tests from all visitors at Beaver Stadium, or moving to limited capacity in the stadium to allow for social distancing in the stands.
If those steps were taken, simulations completed for the Coalition for a Just University assert, the rate of COVID infections sourced to games could be reduced tenfold.
Without them, a CJU spokeswoman said, “we unfortunately expect and anticipate that they (football games) will be super spreader events.”
Six Power Five football conference schools - Boston College, Louisiana State, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington and Washington State - and three National Football League teams are taking tougher stances in the season’s early going, as are (starting in October) the nation’s two largest concert tour promoters.
The Seattle Seahawks announced Thursday they will require proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test within the last 72 hours from fans attending home games. Masks will still have to be worn too, though that’s as per mandates from county and state governments regarding large events and public indoor spaces.
They joined the Las Vegas Raiders and New Orleans Saints.
Filippelli said most of the residents he’s heard from would have liked Penn State — whose home-field crowds are routinely larger than most NFL teams’ — to do something similar.
“Our numbers of cases have been going up in Centre County. Our numbers of people hospitalized have been going up. So, there’s a fairly high level of concern among what I would call the permanent residents of the town,” the mayor said.
But for now, all he and other State College residents can do is cross their fingers and rely on Nittany Nation to be smart about its celebrating.
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Football is back at Penn State. Should the crowd scare us? - PennLive
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