The curling club's most important shot
It's a play on words, you see
You may remember our friends at the Potomac Curling Club just outside Washington, DC. They hosted the 2020 club nationals. Famously, it was one of the earliest COVID-19 superspreader event as well as arguably the last organized sporting event to take place on US soil before The Eternal March. They were also one of several clubs that did not open for the 2020-2021 season.
They might be the first curling club1 that approved a measure to require COVID-19 vaccinations on premises. Exceptions (kids, contractors, those with doctors’ notes) must wear masks. In addition, Fort Wayne’s End of Summerspiel is requiring proof of vaccination to play.
Hopefully your club is having conversations on what you can do. However, depending on where you live, your options may be limited. For example, suppose you live in, oh, let’s say, Ohio. You may have seen videos from anti-vaxxers who claimed, without evidence, the COVID-19 vaccine emits particles that causes others to become magnetized. In the real world, the main side effect is that it prevents you from getting deathly ill from the disease caused by a novel coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2, which is a tremendous benefit. And as we all know, the sucker’s airborne and enjoys spreading itself indoors and infiltrating the lungs of unvaccinated people, who can become very sick as a result of this and are still dying.
Not everyone is eligible to get vaccinated, nor does the vaccine always work on some (because some people’s immune systems just suck). But that’s why 85 percent of a population should strike to gain immunity from it.
We definitely know more about COVID in July 2021 than we did in July 2020, when we were pretty sure it was going to be an impediment to the season fall of 2020 but wasn’t quite sure how to handle it so we erred on the side of All Caution, All The Time (not a bad move!), and in many cases clubs didn’t open at all. It seems safe to say COVID in fall 2021 will not be the same all-encompassing concern, thanks to modern medicine. As a result, we can eschew any “one sweeper” rules, limitations on spare players or building capacities, and the need to slather every shared surface with bleach or sanitizer.2
But the reason we can scale back all these restrictions is because of (1) more knowledge, and (2) more vaccines. If we learned anything, it’s to not take for granted that everyone will be vaccinated and everything will be okay.
Your club should certainly be having these conversations this summer on how to keep the entire club and their families safe. If state law puts one hand behind your back, use the other hand to get creative. For example, Major League Baseball couldn’t force the jabs on their players, but they incentivized teams by scaling back restrictions if 85 percent of their “Tier 1” staff (players, coaches, clubhouse workers) were vaccinated. And the WNBA recently announced that 99 percent of their players got the shot.
Maybe if 85 percent of your curling league has immunity, you can promote it as “COVID-protected.” Even if your restrictive laws can’t preclude someone from joining, you can at least brag about it.
Or maybe it’s something as simple as sending out an email blast to the members stating, hey, we know we can’t make you get the vaccine, but we also can’t stop you from wearing street shoes on the ice and you don’t ever do that, so for the benefit of the club, and to yourselves, please get the shot. And later on, get the flu shot, because both of them are pretty deadly and we have some members who are older and others with pretty bad immune systems, and we’d hate to lose our drinking buddies. Plus if your skip gets magnetized, who knows, maybe your shots will finally curl toward them and into the right spots.
UPDATE: A member from the Diamond State Curling Club in Delaware reports that vaccinated members may curl without a mask.
If there are other clubs which also have similar policies, please let me know, I’d love to share them. If nothing else it would make a good list of places to spiel this season.
We may want to keep the masks around, though, even if not mandatory because not getting the flu absolutely rocked. And I wouldn’t mind handshakes being a relic of the past.