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Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) light heavyweight veteran, Sam Alvey, has bills to pay, and was expecting to use his fight purse at UFC on ESPN 8 to pay them. Unfortunately, his Khalil Rountree showdown — along with the rest of the Columbus card — was shelved in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m very disappointed,” Alvey told MMA Fighting. “I thought for sure it was going to happen, but I’m still convinced that this pandemic is going to pass in the minds of the American people. It’s really embarrassing for me, for our country that it hasn’t yet already. But it’s one of those things. You can’t see the future all the time.”
Alvey (33-13, 1 NC) has dropped his last three fights, two of them by way of technical knockout, and was planning to put that dreadful streak behind him with a breakout performance later this month in “Arch City.”
A global death toll of more than 10,000 put an end to that.
“It’s a huge overreaction,” Alvey said. “Deaths are terrible, and I’m very sorry for all the families that have suffered through that but pneumonia, just a typical flu season right now has killed close to 20,000 people, and people just don’t pay attention to that.”
I’ll let someone smarter than me take it from here.
“Well, the reason is, despite the morbidity and mortality with influenza, there’s a certainty, for example, of seasonal flu,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said. “I can tell you all, guaranteed, that as we get into March and April, the flu cases are going to go down. You could predict pretty accurately what the range of the mortality is and the hospitalizations, as we’ve done over the years.
“The issue now with [coronavirus] is that there’s a lot of unknowns. As you can see just from the media, the number of cases have steeply inclined each and every day. You know that, in the beginning, we were not sure if there were asymptomatic infection, which would make it a much broader outbreak than what we’re seeing. Now we know for sure that there are.
“We still have a low risk to the American public, but we want to keep it at a low risk. And because there are so many unknowns here, we’re going to take the action that the Secretary will describe, in a temporary way, to make sure we mitigate, as best as we possibly can, this risk.”
Alvey remains unconvinced and believes the American people will grow tired of living without modern conveniences, which in turn will pressure politicians to put everything back into place, where coronavirus will soon be forgotten.
“I still suspect it’s going to be like a light switch,” Alvey continued. “It’s going to turn off and people are going to stop caring. People are just going to be upset that stuff is getting closed. I feel like as fast as this is getting everyone riled up, I think everyone is going to be done with it almost as quickly.”