Noone wants to hear this, but our hardwired inability to contain the virus early on was a failure at so many levels. As was the inconsistent messaging from both governments and the "experts".
2020 Schedule Thread
- Thread starter RedOctober3829
- Start date
We shouldn't base policy on stupid misconceptions of the general populace, should we?
The most dangerous misconception out there right now is that it's just a matter of time until there is a perfect cure or a safe vaccine within a year or two.
It may never come. It may come in a decade.
Live sports are not just fun and games. Hundreds of thousands of people's livelihoods are at stake between pro sports, college sports, and youth sports. Millions of children are missing an activity that is critical to their physical and personal development. Millions of adults are missing one of the key things that keep them sane and happy.
People are talking about this like "you can wait to throw your ball around until this crisis is over". Totally missing the point. Given all of the above, just waiting until there is a vaccine is not a plan. We are not going years without sports. That's insane.
It may never come. It may come in a decade.
Live sports are not just fun and games. Hundreds of thousands of people's livelihoods are at stake between pro sports, college sports, and youth sports. Millions of children are missing an activity that is critical to their physical and personal development. Millions of adults are missing one of the key things that keep them sane and happy.
People are talking about this like "you can wait to throw your ball around until this crisis is over". Totally missing the point. Given all of the above, just waiting until there is a vaccine is not a plan. We are not going years without sports. That's insane.
There are people wanting to keep schools and universities closed (oh, I'm sorry, "online only") until there's a vaccine. Cal State just threw in the towel themselves for the forseeable future. Which is even more insane.
I do believe there are good arguments that summer and fall of 2020 are too early for sports with fans to resume. Treatment protocols are slowly improving, and there's a decent chance we can bend the mortality rate downward by the time this awful year comes to a close (antibody treatments and other repurposed drugs will likely help). And there's time to manage hospital capacity issues as well, time we did not have earlier. I tend to believe most people will say "fuck it" by the time 2021 rolls around, and the political pressure to open everything by then will be too hard for any local politician to resist.
Limiting or eliminating fans in Fall 2020...that is a legitimately reasonable consideration.
Telling healthy people under 30 that they can't play or practice football at all...not reasonable.
Telling healthy people under 30 that they can't play or practice football at all...not reasonable.
One also needs to consider the health and welfare of coaches, trainers, assistants, team and stadium personnel, officials, and TV/radio folks. There are a lot of people, and in many cases social distancing and even mask wearing will simply be impossible. I heard one estimate that it would take about 1500 people to put on an NBA game; don't know if it's correct, but even more would be required for an NFL game.
With enough testing, the impact of a player or employee getting the virus can probably be contained. But that could be a lot of testing, and it's an unknown at this point whether we'll have the testing capacity nationwide to contain the virus among the general population; we clearly do not today. It's horrible optics for the league if there are enough tests to put on a game but not enough to contain an outbreak in one of the poorer suburbs of Boston or New York. The testing situation may be improved by the fall (at least the surgeon general thinks it will be), but there are still some unknowns.
Having said that, I have no issue with the NFL exploring the possibility and strategies to make it work.
And it was supposed to give us time for a competent group of people to design, implement, and ramp up production of testing protocols and contact tracing regimes so that when we did ease off, we could quickly identify new clusters and do localized "shutdowns".
We of course did none of that, instead we wasted time on a bunch of nonsense and ego stroking to keep someone happy.
So we have ended up with the worst of both worlds. We took the pain for no gain. So now we are going to take a huge amount of avoidable pain for no gain again and still tank our economy as people were already avoiding going out, doing a lot of things even before the lockdown. Plus several hundred thousands more dead will have a tendency to put a damper on people's spending.
The hangup with sports reopening, from my point of view, continues to be issues with scheduling. If teams are truly testing all players and staff every day or every few days, they will probably be able to overcome a handful of players on a given team who get sick. But even with testing, what happens if half a team or whatever gets infected within a short period of time (which is possible even with mass testing - someone in South Korea just infected like 50 other people from a single night of clubbing and bar-hopping)? Either the league has to basically say, "sorry sucks for you" and force the team to forfeit or play with basically a replacement-level squad for 2 or more weeks or the entire schedule needs to get re-done, neither of which seems like a great option. But at the very least leagues need to grapple with this potential and for now at least it doesn't seem like that is happening - rather, the leagues are just taking a "let's just hope that doesn't happen" stance which seems foolhardy in the extreme.
P.S. - the NFL's suggestion that they could address issues by pushing back the opening of the season a few weeks is laughable. Do they really think that somehow the virus is still going to be prevalent enough in September that playing games is ill-advised but somehow by October it will magically have gone away? If anything, the league may want to consider starting earlier and building in a bunch more bye weeks to deal with the inevitable scheduling challenges and to minimize gameplay and travel in the winter months when we are very likely to be looking at least at a minor resurgence of the virus at best and a full-blown second wave at worst.
P.S. - the NFL's suggestion that they could address issues by pushing back the opening of the season a few weeks is laughable. Do they really think that somehow the virus is still going to be prevalent enough in September that playing games is ill-advised but somehow by October it will magically have gone away? If anything, the league may want to consider starting earlier and building in a bunch more bye weeks to deal with the inevitable scheduling challenges and to minimize gameplay and travel in the winter months when we are very likely to be looking at least at a minor resurgence of the virus at best and a full-blown second wave at worst.
I know lexageorge is strongly in “the masses will demand reopening schools/sports etc” camp. Two things: 1) I am equally convinced that some significant number will be in another camp so that’s hard to resolve and 2) you open up schools or sports and of course someone will die....and of course people will freak out; it may be a coach, a player, a player’s family member, a freshman, a professor, a cafeteria worker. People die every day I know: I am just not sure that accepting this risk is as fully baked into the common consciousness as others seem to believe.
As long as you can ensure that every coach, trainer, auxiliary personnel, site security, entourage member, food service worker, and family member of those healthy players is also tested and cleared of the virus, then sure
I'm in the camp that we cannot wait years for a vaccine to resume life. Professional sports are a significant contributor to multiple local economies, and it's not realistic for them to disappear for multiple years. Nor is it realistic for schools to remain closed (oh, I'm sorry, online only) for that period of time.
Anecdotal, but most people that I know that live in the Bay Area were clearly on Team Tesla when they reopened their factory in defiance of Alameda County (since settled). Also, most people in Germany and Italy are supportive of the reopening of their soccer leagues.
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That's just not a reasonable expectation. If you think the people will be okay staying locked down and not attending school or playing sports until those requirements are met, I'll just say...we'll see.
There are no perfect choices here. People soon are going to have to learn to live with some risk.
I always want to ask those who say that a certain amount of deaths is acceptable if they'll sacrifice themselves or their families if it means we can watch guys throw around a ball
They effectively say "yes" to this quesiton every time they put their kids in the car and drive to such an event.
A certain amount of deaths is inherent in every choice.
The NHS in the UK estimated, few weeks back, that they would have 20,000 deaths from the covid 19 virus in the UK . . . and that the way all other medical procedures and checkups were put off to be sure to take care of covid 19 will result in as many as 150,000 deaths from cancer.
Nothing escapes cause and effect.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1268059/cancer-deaths-coronavirus-nhs
I work in athletics and I don't think we should be resuming without the proper testing and other precautions necessary to continue on safely. Especially in college, there will be lawsuits if they bring back athletics if schools aren't open to the regular student body. It just isn't smart. Beyond the playing fields/courts, the locker room/training room/weight room scenarios make for many densely populated areas for teams that the virus could be contracted and spread. I want to get back to normalcy in my life and professionally that includes athletics, but not with the risk it entails this fall.
Exactly ... but when a NASCAR driver chooses to race, those who are in his orbit when he's out of the car don't face the same risk of injury or death that s/he does.
This is much better said than I started with.
All the statistics seem to say that there, effectively, isn't any risk for people of school age.
From page 2 of the CDC's own May 1 summary:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/pdf/covidview-05-01-2020.pdf
"For people65 years and older, current COVID-19 hospitalization rates are similar to those observed during comparable time points*during recent high severity influenza seasons".o
"For children(0-17 years), COVID-19 hospitalization rates are much lower than influenza hospitalization rates during recent influenza seasons."
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Until they, having come in contact with other carriers, come in contact with those not of school age.
As someone said above, all pain no gain. The people in charge were playing with themselves while the rest of us were /are locked down, while the lockdown was *supposed* to allow something else to take place, other than a demand that we "re-open cuz' we have to."
Starting team sports in the Fall is just saying "fuck it, lets see what happens." Which also might be among the last thoughts of Kobe Bryant's pilot.
Not going to lie, though, if the weather was poor at home, I would probably watch these fan-free petri dishes. But -- unless there are drastic changes on the testing/treatment front -- I'd be stunned if any team-filled league was running for more than 3 weeks before illness shut it down. Then what? For all the talk about sports being for the national psyche, what happens to the national psyche in the case of an illness-related re-shutdown?
This is an idiotic line of reasoning. There is NO option here that doesn't involve people suffering and dying. You're not saving anyone's life by demanding that huge segments of our society just go on mothballs for years.
New York announced the Kawasaki-Covid connection May 4. That May 1 doc is based on mid-April data. The good news is our knowledge about this disease is rapidly evolving. But the risks for kids is still unknown. It wasn't even mentioned in the Senate yesterday, but it strikes me that even if there really "isn't any risk (effectively) for people of school age" (But there is)--those kids are all potential vectors. They are bringing it home to granny, and all those grandmothers are bringing it to all those nurses in all those ICUs.
Which no one is actually saying, as far as I can tell. That there WAS an missed opportunity to sharply reduce suffering and dying doesn't mean society should just say, "oh well, lets go suffer and die" without further exploration of ways to avoid it.
Without getting into V&N territory - if you're arguing we need a vaccine before having fans at sporting events again, this is what you're saying.
Make no mistake, people are currently suffering and dying and will continue to suffer and die at some level regardless of what we do. But we can be smarter about protecting the narrow demographic that is truly vulnerable to this and still play football.
I agree with the bolded, but it still may be much more feasible in 2021, even with no vaccine.