Just speculating, but I would imagine that if schools close, it's a done deal. Can't have school sports if schools are shut down. If it goes to remote/on-line, then I would think that it can still be done, but it will be with strict rules to follow. Unreal that we are still right where we were mid March.
I don't quite follow you here. Schools will not just "shut down." If kids are no longer physically attending school, school will become virtual/remote. The school districts are not going to just cease teaching.
And yes, it is unreal that we are still where we are. A lot of the spike in numbers that occurred in the late summer/early fall were driven by universities starting back. That has leveled off, though. To illustrate, tOSU had 2,831 cumulative cases on 9/24 with a 3.1% positivity. Last week, on 10/17, those numbers stood at 3,279 and 2.2%. There are estimated, through a 14 day average, to be 330 active cases. Ohio State is doing a lot of testing. Through last weekend they have done nearly 150,000 tests of students alone. Other schools around Ohio have had similar trends. Miami, a school not nearly as large as Ohio State, has 2,175 cumulative positive cases. Miami stands at somewhere around 380 active cases. Dayton has not been great either but it has leveled off.
There are other universities where the numbers being reported seem to be really low compared to the student population. Through 10/8 Akron was only reporting 61 cases and they are currently claiming that there are only 7 active cases. Kent State is only claiming a total of 282 cases. Kent's and Akron's numbers are really hard to believe given that the College of Wooster, with a hair under 2,000 students, has had 101 positive cases since testing began. Wooster went totally remote last week, BTW, and has very strict protocols in place regarding when kids can leave dorms. It's basically just to get food from the dining halls.
A school that has gone totally off the rails is Ohio U. As of yesterday OU has given 994 tests to students and have had 492 positive tests. Looking at OU and the numbers of tests that they've done draws attention to how there is such a wide discrepancy in testing and standards. Ohio U has around 20,000 students at the Athens campus and has given less than 1,000 tests while Wooster has less than 2,000 students and has given around 3,700 tests. All of this tells me that there are a lot more cases than we know. It also shows that on the whole we don't know what we're doing.
The current spike in numbers is being driven by people that should know better - the adults. They've gotten sloppy and careless. Some of this is being driven by false assurances that as a country "we're rounding the corner." A lot of it could have been avoided and it didn't mean by shutting things down. All that it would have taken is people being smart & careful. With a vaccine still not being imminent, people had better get it together if they want some semblance of normalcy.
Where everything is getting really dicey is in the number of critical care beds that we have in Ohio. The state has a total 3,758 critical care beds. A little over 2,600 of them are filled. Having around 1,100 open critical care beds might sound like a lot but it really isn't. Look at the three largest counties in the state. Cuyahoga has about 200 open critical care beds, Franklin has about 120, and Hamilton has about 100.