About COVID, Coffee Shop, and Gator Coach Mullen

At this writing I'm sitting midday at the nearest Starbucks...outside, because they are now operating at full capacity seating and a lot more customers than I'm comfortable with are seated inside although they're mostly wearing masks.  Blessed with the tempting but generally useless gift of hindsight, I'm becoming more of the opinion that it's a shame that back in February they couldn't have drastically stepped up emergency production and distribution of masks and pushed much harder on universal compliance instead of completely shutting down businesses and schools the following month and mandating people to stay at home: I believe those draconian measures contributed a lot to people irrationally rebelling against mask use and social distancing later on.  But here we are and, despite the coronavirus pandemic showing no sign of retreat, more and more people are acting as if they're so fed up with it all that they want to pretend it's no longer there.  After the University of Florida's 41-38 loss to Texas A&M at College Station, Gator head coach Dan Mullen commented that he wanted to see Florida's home stadium packed with fans for the following week's game against LSU.  That statement caused a firestorm of criticism against him and deservedly so, but the University's president reiterated that the stadium would only be operating at 25% capacity.  Mullen seemed to blame his team's loss to the Aggies for what he perceived to be a noisy crowd there, but I think he needs to get his head on straight on two counts: (1) the Gators defense this year is mediocre at best with the team giving up 100 points in their first three games and (2) football is a game played for entertainment and people's lives are at stake with this pandemic: he needs to seriously sort out his priorities.  A few days later, as it was revealed that some 21 players plus staff on his team had tested positive for COVID-19 and that the LSU game was postponed until December 12th, Mullen claimed that he never meant for the stadium to be full of fans...but that's not what he said the previous Saturday afternoon.  And yesterday he announced that he himself has tested positive.  I have mixed feelings about leaders who trivialize this disease that has killed around 220,000 Americans during the past seven months and then come down with it themselves...they deserve some rebuke but my hopes and prayers are for their full recovery...