PITTSBURGH AND SURROUNDING AREAS — Communities throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania are calling on health experts to start summarizing their comprehensive, data-heavy, life-saving information on COVID-19 in the form of a singular convenient Steelers analogy.
“‘Inverse curves’ and ‘exponential decline’ sure sound fancy and stuff,” said Plum resident Brett Mascari, “but that don’t help me none running my household offense. If these science whizzes are so smart, they’d just tell us to hand the ball off three times and trust the defense to hold strong. Like, how the hell am I supposed to comfort my kids if I don’t even know the down or yardage?”
In light of this pressure, Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine attempted yesterday to make her advisories more accessible to the regional public.
“After reviewing the potential outcomes that emerged from several different data sets and synthesizing it with common confounding variables, we still advise individuals to mainta—er, sorry,” she said. “We’re up by two scores, so we want you to keep running a zone out there. There’s no way to guarantee we won’t give up some first downs, maybe even a field goal, but it’ll keep the the virus from from landing any splash plays in your neighborhoods.”
Encouraged by the non-verbal cues, she managed to extend the analogy further.
“Listen, that doesn’t mean you can’t run the occasional corner blitz to the grocery store or distributor when the timing feels right,” she said to a chorus of agreeable noises and head-nodding from local constituents invited to attend the briefing. “But you’ve got to be like Mike Hilton out there: explode off the line towards the quarterback and make the tackle before the virus can make adjustments.”
As of press time, Dr. Levin had reportedly compared a possible second wave of cases to the Patriots’ Super Bowl LI comeback and was waiting for the section of locals to stop booing.
