A short note in the middle of Tuesday’s COVID-19 update with B.C. health minister Adrian Dix and provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry: don’t expect physical distancing to end any time soon.
Asked about how long the current measures, which limit large gatherings of people among other things, are likely to stay in place, Dix was pretty clear: for a while.
He said last week that he expected the measures to stay in place until at least the end of April. On Tuesday, he rated the chances of an April easing at zero, then added there was “little to no chance” of those measures being eased in May.
This is in keeping with the kind of projections we are hearing elsewhere in North America. Toronto officials on Tuesday cancelled all permits for large events through the end of June, though they later clarified this doesn’t include sporting events.
Henry added that the current wave of infection isn’t expected to end until May. And there’s the fear in the background that a second wave could come back later in the year.
So, if you were hoping for live sports that features a crowd of fans in the stands in the next month or two, don’t bank on it.
Things might be somewhat better here by May, but remember that in relative terms, the state of the pandemic in B.C. is as good as it gets in North America. Many parts of the United States are only going to get worse as we possibly settle down. And Ontario still feels like a powder keg.
The broader scene needs to improve before any sport can contemplate coming back.
For any sport to come back, they’ve got to find venues to play at while also having a league full of healthy players. And the ability to travel around the continent, even if games are centralized in fewer arenas than normal.
There’s a public morale case to be made for finding a way for sports leagues and other cultural institutions to come back in some way, shape or form. There’s a reason that baseball and hockey were told to carry on with playing during the Second World War: people needed happy distractions.
The NHL, of course, would prefer to play their games with fans in the stands. But even if there aren’t any, they could still play games in closed arenas for the viewing public to watch on television.
Also on Tuesday, Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, speaking on Sportsnet 650 radio, said he understood that if the NHL were forced to cancel the remainder of the the 2019-20 season, including the playoffs, the league would lose more than $1 billion in revenue. In 2018-19, the league as a whole made $5 billion in revenue.
A full cancellation would lead to player salaries being hit by as much as 35 per cent in escrow.
Playing even a shortened schedule would greatly reduce those losses, Friedman estimated, by as much as 80 per cent. Escrow would still be substantial.
So you can see, the financial pressures to play somehow, some way, are big. But it’s not coming any time soon.
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