It's the pits

"(This) has been catastrophic for the industry, says Jim Sitton. “Covid has pretty much shut our business down for the moment,” Sitton says. “If the industry comes back, hopefully we’ll be around to see that happen.”

"This" is the COVID-19 novel coronavirus, you know.  Care to guess what industry Mr Sitton is part of?

The restaurant industry? Not directly.

Automobile sales? No.

Gambling, airlines, hotels, movie theaters, live sports?

No, no, no, no, and no.

He is president of 21st Century Products, which manufactures ball-pit balls.

Foolhardy

Think about it. Even the most foolhardy of us knows the basics of keeping oneself free of the deadly virus.  Well, almost.

And who's about to share drinks or attend large parties or hug strangers or reach into a communal dish of bar snacks, knowing the risks inherent?

And who in the world would send their child to a pool of colorful plastic balls to "swim" among the cooties left behind by who knows who?

As the Washington POST describes them, a ball pit is "What once looked like an ocean of color is now a sea of respiratory droplets. Unsafe waters. A breeding ground for extremophile bacteria, like the darkest crevices of the Mariana Trench."

Professor Peter Raynor from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health notes that when we look at covid risks, "We talk about the three C's:

• Closed spaces
• Crowded places
• Close contact

Ball pits tick off all three!

All across the country, it's sort of a back-burner issue as to when ball pits will be open again.  Massachusetts puts them in Phase 4 (and we're having trouble getting past phase 2 in most states). California put out a list of recreational facilities that could reopen, and they were nowhere to be seen. Even Tennessee, which seemed so avid to reopen everything asap, calls pits “areas where social distancing is difficult or impossible to maintain” and that means they are off limits to visitors.

Nationally, when you think ball pits, you think of McDonald's Play Places (Closed) and IKEA's Småland (that's the Swedish word for "place to leave the kids so you can go upstairs and shop for bar stools and knife blocks) “will remain closed at this time as an added safety measure. We are unable to comment about the future of ball pits at this time," says an IKEA spökeswömän.

Professor Raynor reminds us that even though people will tell you that play areas, dining spaces, and theater seats have been treated with antibacterial cootie spray, antibacterial is not anti­viral.

And he points out that it would be embarrassing "for someone who contracts the corona­virus to have to admit to a contact tracer that they had been playing in a ball pit during a pandemic. It’s something that’s not necessary, and it’s kind of pointless,” he says. “Why take the risk at this point in time?”

So let's not.