Well with Melbourne in lock down 7 players wont be playing nine news in Brisbane just reported.
Seven of the Storm's biggest names have been ruled out of the NRL All Stars clash due to the five-day Victorian lockdown announced on Friday.
Indigenous flyer Josh Addo-Carr and Maori All Stars reps Jesse and Kenny Bromwich, Reimis and Brandon Smith, Jahrome Hughes and Nelson Asofa-Solomona have all been scratched from next Saturday's season-opener in Townsville.
Starting with the big picture and working backwards, the new strains are a new level of threat to the NRL competition.
Last years model for keeping the competition going will have to be re thought. Outwardly not much will change in terms of the restrictions of the NRL bubble, internally they will be packing bricks at NRL HQ.
They will have to have a serious think around how they protect the competition from the new model of containment.
Rapid shut downs of states without warning, level four, that is what the NRL need to be thinking about, until there is herd immunity in Australia.
This one example has basically wrecked a match.
During season proper, that could have been the Storm unable to host or travel to a match.
The same applies to all teams that will be hoping for interstate travel.
The key takeaway, is that with the new strains, you get little to no warning of pending lock downs, unlike what people saw last year....where there was a lag in the incubation period of the virus....I will not go into it in detail here, there is a covid thread already.