Now maybe we can get more serious about battling COVID-19. It wasn’t enough for friends and family to die younger than they should have and it wasn’t enough that we have had to take the fight all the way down to the elementary school level and have our children in the middle of a political debate over masks. But now our weekends and in particular the much loved National Football League and Pittsburgh Steelers have been impacted. Now, we can’t have that.

Will the casino sports books have to expand the betting lines to adjust whether star quarterbacks are placed on the COVID lists? Will beer prices change as the teams place players on the restricted lists? Now these are real issues. Is Aaron Rodgers the appropriate spokesperson for telling us whether to vaccinate? It has already been determined that it should not be Big Bird, and Rodgers wears some of the same colors.

Big Ben’s encounter with COVID-19 caused all Steelers fans the pain and embarrassment of having to watch Mason Rudolph try to do his best Duck Hodges impression on Sunday at Heinz Field. There is no way we can stand for this kind of debacle.

Obviously this is the final straw and the one that must unite everyone from all political positions to stop the madness. Getting beat (a tie with Detroit is a loss) by a winless team can’t be found acceptable even if we were OK with loss of life previously. And the Packers quarterback showed the medical community that he knows far more about treatment for COVID than all of them do put together.

Did we just give both sides of the argument? You mean it still isn’t settled? Where can we turn now? Does anyone have Harry Potter’s contact information? Either the Wizard of Oz (wait, isn’t he running for governor of Pennsylvania) or the graduate of Hogwarts School of Wizardry must help us before the Bengals stop being the Bungals and the Browns stop being, well, the Browns.

There is nothing at all funny about COVID. What is funny is how people have made it a political issue rather than a health issue. An old musical number from “Gypsy” includes the following verse in a song called “Small World.”

“We have so much in common it’s a phenomenon.

We could pool our resources by joining forces from now on,

Small World isn’t it?

It is a small world and maybe sometimes too small.

What will it take before we pool our resources and solve this pandemic? The Pirates to win the World Series? No, it isn’t funny, but neither is the way we are acting. For the sake of our children and the world, let this be the beginning of the end for COVID-19.

— RV