Solid post and you make some good points. And it's nice to see a post absent the histrionic "if all you cocksuckers would have just worn masks, we'd have football now!"
This entire thread is a pretty good sampling of the larger COVID debate, albeit with all the Surly charm, and it will be interesting to revisit in a few months once things hopefully start to move past the hysterical stage.
"We've had literally over a century to figure out how to mitigate the dangers that already exist in football." This is true, though CTE could be considered a "novel" danger comparatively to the others. And much as how knee injuries are no longer career-ending due to the improvements in treatment, so too with COVID after these last 6 months. Treatments have clearly improved. We aren't doing the same shit we were doing in April, and the virus, for whatever reason, has become far less deadly. Many scientists have written about the T-cell response and herd immunity. Many have discussed the seasonality of coronaviruses. No matter what side of the debate you choose, one thing we do know for certain with this disease is that 80% of the deaths have occurred in people over 65 years of age, and most of the deaths outside that age group had other health issues, including obesity. And no, despite what the scales tell you, a 20 year old 300 lb football player is not "obese" the way a trailer park Okie is. "The unknown longterm effects" is a red herring, and is impossible to refute at this stage.
The reason people keep bringing up CTE is due to the fact that the longterm effects of that disease are actually known, yet they are "mitigated" now through protocols and other shit which we all know are likely not a genuine preventative to the issue. Concussion Protocol is used to manage a problem inherent in the sport, not stop it from ever occurring. COVID will be treated the same way. They will attempt to mitigate risk and do what they need to do to manage the situation. CTE will still happen despite all efforts to mitigate, and players will test positive for COVID. And if we aren't going to stop playing football for one, we shouldn't stop for the other. It has nothing to do with "you can't catch CTE standing on the sideline." You could also say that you can't eradicate a virus by shutting down the economy, putting healthy people in quarantine, killing businesses and keeping children out of schools.