In normal times, Thursday would have kicked off one of the busiest sports stretches of the year in the United States.
Hundreds of thousands of fans would have packed into arenas around the country for the first and second rounds of the NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments in the next few days.
Another 100,000 or so might have been inside U.S. Bank Stadium for three days of the NCAA Division I wrestling championships. Combined with fans at NHL and NBA arenas, MLS fields and MLB spring training sites, total attendance easily would have topped 1 million in only a few days' time.
That doesn't account for everyone jamming into bars, restaurants and Las Vegas sportsbooks to get a glimpse of the college basketball action — a men's basketball tournament television audience that averaged 10 million people per game last year.
With that as a backdrop, it's plain to see why sporting events have been put on hold or canceled altogether as a precaution to help prevent the spread of coronavirus.
The very things that make sports this time of year so much fun — with March Madness leading the way — are the same things that make them so dangerous during a worldwide pandemic.
When dealing with a contagious virus that can have deadly consequences — particularly for vulnerable members of the population — controlling the things we can control is key. The oft-repeated phrase "social distancing" is particularly apt and was described well by University of California-San Francisco epidemiologist Jeff Martin.
"We're not at a stage to modify the first two factors — the biologic behavior of the virus or the susceptibility of individuals," Martin recently said in an interview posted on the school's website. "But each of us can decrease the number and duration of our contacts with others."
