More Covid Balls – from Australia (where else!).
Another day, another bobby-dazzler from Australia’s Covid Crazies. Perth, the capital city of the state of Western Australia, has traditionally hosted a Test cricket match against the visiting English team but Covid has thrown a spanner in the works for the upcoming Test series. Labor Party state Premier, Mark McGowan, is the global holdout for Zero Covid and he believes that his unique blend of repeated lockdowns, closed state and international borders, forever-masks and vaccine mandates for employment (affecting 75% of the state‘s workforce) has conquered the virus in his hermit state (naturally-acquired herd immunity and WA’s glorious sunshine having nothing to do with it).
Yet, the English flanneled fools pose a dilemma for McGowan. Let them into his state and his Zero Covid cred may go down the s-bend because they may be INFECTED(!) and pass the ‘deadly’ disease to his cleanskin subjects. Keeping the foreign cricketers out, however, thus costing his state its traditional test, could anger his subjects and be electorally damaging, too.
How to resolve this conundrum? Yes, he says, the English can come but only after doing quarantine (cut to five days as a special privilege), staying in their ‘bubble’ at all times and, because you can’t be too complacent about the Armageddon virus, the English players will not be able to have any physical contact with the crowd, including that which is mediated by a cricket ball which crosses the boundary (for a six or a four) and is thrown back into play by the fans who touch it because, dontchaknow, that will transmit a virus from the potentially infected foreigners to the cleanskin crowd. Any ball going over the ropes will have to be replaced by a ball (in similar condition, according to the rules and according to revered tradition) – every single time, dragging the already long five-day game out into infinity!
There is precedent for this latest spasm of Covid cricketing lunacy. In last year’s twenty-overs Big Bash League competition in Australia, umpires gave the ball a disinfectant wipe after every six-hit and players who retrieved the ball from the crowd were required to sanitise their hands. South Australia’s Chief Health Panjandram tried something similar during the last Australian Rules Football season by instructing the crowd not to touch the football when its goes out of bounds into the crowd (this directive was, thankfully, ignored by sensible people).
The latest cricket balls from Emperor McGowan is pure hygiene theatre because:
(1) surface transmission of the virus has been roundly debunked by now with even the Covid-compliant CDC saying that there is only a one in ten thousand chance of being infected by touching a surface (aerosol transmission is how the virus gets around),
(2) asymptomatic transmission doesn’t happen and fit and healthy elite athletes like Test cricketers would not be on the field if they really had Covid, and
(3) outdoors transmission is also not a thing (the cricket ground at Perth is an open air sports venue).
Three different levels of crazy – all of them tick-boxed by McGowans’ dumb decision on the T&Cs for Perth’s Test match. And all of it solely to keep the populace fearful and obedient – there’s a ‘deadly pandemic’ waiting to engulf us (you know, the one that, for the vulnerable elderly immuno-compromised, has a flu-like survival rate of 99.85% (for the original Alpha strain, now up to 99.904% for the Delta variant) and which, unlike the flu, leaves the kids entirely alone and which is a nothingburger, mortality-wise, for everyone in between) unless you all follow our orders on lockdown, masks, sealing the state off from the world and from fellow Australians, and not touching cricket balls!
Fortunately the cricket ball lunacy has been met with derisive donkey-braying by the sports commentariat, yet it may not harm McGowan whose approval rating in September amongst the Zero-Covid-deluded public was a mind-staggering, and quite depressing, 78%.