There will not be sports until we have testing, because we can’t function as a society until then. Sports are a sign of a highly functioning society. Instead of worrying about when sports return, we need to get things right for all of us.

We can’t play sports in a bubble, or on the moon, or on a blimp floating over Antarctica. Sports reflect a healthy, functioning society and until it’s back for all of us, sports are rightfully on pause.

Think of everything that has to work: a functioning pipeline to the pro leagues, roads and transport to games, doctors who can focus on athletes, disposable income to buy tickets, advertising for broadcasts... that’s all interrupted right now. It’s more than just playing a game.

To produce a game you’d need refs, and everyone needed for the broadcast, and maintenance and delivery, and team staff, and people to feed all those people and clean the locker rooms. And you have to keep them all healthy.

If you can test players every week and on gameday, you can reduce the risk to acceptable levels. But we don’t have those tests. We can’t even test our front line health care workers or people with mild symptoms. You can’t justify systematically testing athletes before them.

So we need for the world to work again before we can add sports back into the mix. Because we need for the framework that allows sports to function to be there for all of us to function. There’s no untangling the two.