Which probably factor into the decision of when to resume sports.
Right now we know there have been more than a million Americans test positive for COVID-19 and there are likely about 400,000 circulating cases (not recovered, currently hospitalized or died). But that is based on current levels of testing, which are not very good. It’s probably some multiple of that.
A Georgia Tech professor produced this graph. The bottom horizontal dotted line is 400K circulating cases, the number we have now; the top one is 4 million circulating cases. Then he shows the likelihood that someone in a particular crowd size will have an active case.
10,000 at a soccer match would be equal to a sellout at Baum Walker. Even at current testing levels, the chance that someone at a BWS sellout would be a carrier is >99%. Bump that up to 15,000 at BWA, 60,000 at RRS or 100K at an LSU game and it’s essentially a certainty that somebody there has an active asymptomatic case. Even for 100 people at a wedding (or a big class at UA), there’s an 11% chance that someone there is a carrier – and that’s if the 400K number is correct, which is very unlikely.
I read this morning that the NFL wants to coordinate the 2020-21 schedule with colleges because they don’t want a college season going on when the NFL would be doing the combine or drafting people. If the colleges can’t go in September, or November, will the NFL go ahead? NFL is going to release a schedule later this week, starting on time in September, but that one is going to be written in pencil.
What’s going to allow us to start IMO would be a reduction of that 400K number to a lot less than that.
The numbers I’m more interested in are how many people are actively infected and what percentage of those people are hospitalized. Just making people sick doesn’t make the virus dangerous enough to treat it any differently than the flu or any number of seasonal viruses/illnesses we deal with annually.
Unless you just woke up from a coma, people already know that if you are in a high risk group, you need to be more careful until there’s some change in your vulnerability(virus dies out or we get a vaccine) because you are more likely to get seriously ill. We already know that nursing homes have to take extraordinary precautions. The decision on whether to allow mass gatherings of people really shouldn’t be driven by those two things.
It’s overloading the hospitals that is the biggest problem going down the road. If the hospitals can’t handle the increased cases, then you have to choke down the new infection numbers. If the hospitals can’t do anything but handle the increased cases, and let everyone else not bleeding to death or having a heart attack wait, that’s probably just as bad or worse.
Right now we don’t have a very good idea of how many infected people out of every hundred infected will be sick enough to be hospitalized. We know that there are a lot more actual infected than confirmed infected, and we know that this virus passes along quickly in some circumstances, so anyone who gets infected at a game is probably going to infect others. What we don’t have a good idea about is that if a game eventually results in 1000 people getting infected over the course of two or three weeks how many of those people will end up in the hospital.
Once you know that on average X people out every hundred newly infected people will wind up in the hospital then you can make some informed decisions about whether we can handle the consequences of letting people get together in large groups.
The asymptomatic carriers are precisely why we need social distancing. You may not get sick, but if you give it to 100 people and 20 of them get sick and two of those 20 die, that’s a lot worse than just you getting sick yourself. If you get the seasonal flu, you stay home for a few days, get over it, you’re no longer contagious and you resume your normal life. But if you have the coronavirus and don’t know it and don’t practice social distancing, YOU are the biological bomb.
Good to know that the 50k who died from the flu all stayed at home, and that no one gave it to them. I guess it was the immaculate reception of the flu.
My son’s pediatrician was telling me the other day that it’s not a matter of “if” people will be exposed by social distancing, its “when” are people going to be exposed. He said there are millions that have probably been exposed but feel no ill affects. He said the whole social distancing thing is a good idea at first to keep the health care system from being overrun, but eventually, social distancing will have to stop because it’s not going to work in the long run. Viruses just don’t go away from social distancing.
Now, we can’t accept that, he’s just a Dr wanting his business to get back to normal! It seems that’s the reply on anything that goes against everyone dying from it.
Social distancing buys time, there’s no question about it. Time for a treatment, time for a vaccine, time for people to develop their own antibodies. Your pediatrician is absolutely right; the virus isn’t going away.
No doubt the social distancing has a limited time to do any good. What we hope the “shutdown” does is buy us enough time to test people to find who is carrying & who likely isn’t. It can also tell us who has had it. Eventually, we’re likely to have a vaccine and some sort of good treatment & life can get back to normal. If we never get a vaccine or a cure, & it turns out social distancing doesn’t help the spread, we’ll get back to normal. However, “normal” will mean we live like people did when pandemics hit years ago. We’ll know a whole bunch of us will die prematurely.
Some people want to hurry up the normalization of life as if this virus is just no big deal. “We’re all gonna die sometime.” They’re perfectly willing to sacrifice people to it. I suspect the ones they’re willing to sacrifice are the low-pay workers who are essential but replaceable.
We have vaccines for the flu virus and it has never gone away. It comes back each year in several mutations and 30,000 people die despite vaccines tailored to stop it each year. I seriously doubt that any of the eight reported vaccines world wide being rushed out will stop it cold. The best hope will be some kind of treatment that will knock down the severity and the high death rate
Nice. Sacrifice the low-pay workers who are replaceable. All those neanderthals are bloodthirsty.
My piousness is so tiny compared to yours it is probably a slightly glowing ember. I feel the heat from your glow through the monitor. So much precise understanding and wisdom to wade pass all the lab studies that fail to line up with your unerring
judgement. We mere mortals hang our heads to avert your disapproving glare.
this virus doesn’t have to completely go away to make it something we can handle. We just have to figure out a way to make it less communicable or more treatable. The problem we face with this is the unknown. How many would get terribly sick, how many would die, if we didn’t go out of the way to social distance & restrict large gatherings? We just don’t know. If we can make tests available soon in large numbers, we’ll at least have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.
I have said many times that the side effects of this disease will be more damaging than the disease itselfI don’t know if I’d call it the worst mistake in history but this is a article perfectly describing what I’m talkin about and there are a lot of people feeling this way, nobody wants to see anybody die but you can’t lock down the world this long and not suffer irreversible damage.
He’s not the only one that has basically said the same thing. The economic crash as well as a suicide, clinical depression, substance abuses, domestic abuses, if you could add all those up it would be staggering amount… I know a few in law enforcement and they tell me the numbers are way up in domestic violence cases, people are upset it not being able to try to make a living for their family and unfortunately take it out on the ones closest to them.
There’s no doubt everything about this virus, including the economic crash, is having terrible effects outside the actual virus itself. The doctor who treated all the covid patients, caught it herself, recovered & then committed suicide is an example of the consequences of the stress.
I’ve vowed to not get into this fight anymore but, to summarize the conversation:
If you don’t want to stay locked down you have no value on human life and are only interested in money.
If you want to stay locked down you’re killing the economy and have a political agenda.
Surely there’s some middle ground between those two. Youdaman has tried to walk that line and I think has done it really well. But, neither side is willing to give an inch. I don’t know the answer but I don’t think everyone has a political agenda and I don’t think the other side just doesn’t care if people die. .
I think it’s pretty sad that we either have to be heartless heathens or left wing nut jobs.
I’ll be glad when we can argue about who should be the QB, why so and so isn’t in the starting 5.
I think this thing has been around much longer than we’ve been told. We probably should have cancelled last football season. I’m going to pretend it didn’t happen.
