At the ACC Tournament in a coronavirus time warp

I’m supposed to be covering basketball right now, at the 2020 ACC Tournament, in an arena half-filled with fans, eating, drinking, being merry.

Feels like a time warp.

Literally every couple of minutes, another news alert buzzes on my watch.

The WHO has declared a coronavirus pandemic.

UVA joins list of colleges and universities moving classes online.

Seattle, San Francisco banning fans from athletics events.

The Warriors will play a home game Thursday with no fans.

But here in the Greensboro Coliseum, basketball is being played, cheerleaders are doing what cheerleaders do.

The student bands are playing fight songs.

Folks around me are eating hot dogs and popcorn and drinking sodas.

I’m not an alarmist on these kinds of things. I’ve been reading up on this as much as is humanly possible, and from what I’ve learned, this strain of the coronavirus, for most people, will result in mild symptoms, ranging from a cold to a bad flu.

But also from what we know now, it’s dangerous for seniors, for people with underlying medical conditions.

And the bigger danger for those folks is that we don’t know how it spreads, and we don’t have a vaccine.

Lots we know, lots we don’t know, and it’s the part that we don’t know that has us roiled.

Well, us.

Right now, the us I’m a part of is 10,000 fans (and counting) watching college basketball, like we would have been doing anyway.

Weird.

Story by Chris Graham