Will COVID-19 be the needle that finally bursts the sports bubble?

'I think I made a mistake': 30-year-old Texan dies at hospital after attending Covid-19 'hoax' party - KVIA

 

As to "no one thinks it will be their kid", I'm seeing a lot of folks with children who are saying "Hell no, I'm not sending my kids back to school yet."

 

There are a whole lot of teachers in our area reassessing their decision to hold off retirement. And just because you signed a contract to teach at the end of the school year doesn't necessarily mean you can't tell the district you've changed your mind.

School districts are already facing teacher shortage crises in many areas of the country. If the teachers who do decide to stick with it start testing positive, where are the substitutes coming from? I don't see many Republican lawmakers lining up to handle that job.

 

Teachers are the other half of how I should have constructed that argument. Anyone over fifty who works for a school or university has to be looking at their level of exposure and the plans to protect them, calculating the risk of Covid against the need for a continued paycheck.

 

But it's the libruhl media's fault if college footbawwwl isn't played. Right.
When the head of the SEC is talking about health concerns and lamenting politization of mask-wearing, it's pretty clear that the problem lies with the general populace -- and disproportionately within the SEC footprint these days -- rather than with some imaginary cabal of sportswriters who are trying to sabotage their own careers.
The Big Ten took all sorts of grief for being first in announcing a conference-only schedule. Their action did not start an otherwise improbable chain reaction; it merely expressed what everybody else knew but was afraid to confront.

 

This is the problem with how we're failing at this in general. Too many people give two craps about it because they don't think it can impact them. That 99 percent of people will be fine. That young and healthy people will be fine. Until they aren't.

How many stories on camps and I didn't think it would happen to me have we seen sprout up especially recently? And not even consider that it is still dangerous to those around you even if you are mostly OK. That's were sports are such a question mark. So many people are involved. High schools are especially bad because there are hundreds if not thousands of people that can be impacted at just one school once you get back to teachers, administrators, janitors, then home to parents and grandparents. Times that by whatever when two schools from different areas play each other. There's just so much unknown to be sure we're safe with this.

Yet, it won't happen to us and we need our football.

 

"I need a haircut, and I miss going to bars and restaurants."

How did that one work out?

 

Many people have been catching COVID 19 from their haircuts.

 

No, they've been catching it because of governors who responded to such complaints by opening too soon.

 

When would have been the right time, in your opinion?
A lot of the states that reopened did so because their case numbers were flattening out -- which was supposedly the goal we set in March.

 

Wasn't one of the big ones to have a 14-day downward trajectory of cases and people with symptoms? Some states I think were there, but others jumped the gun. Florida, I'm looking in your direction. And even with the downward trajectory, things were thrown open too soon. There was no need for bars, nightclubs and movie theaters to open as soon as they did (Arizona). I recall one of the biggest criticisms was we weren't seeing numbers fall like they were supposed to.

We probably needed an extra two to three weeks of where we were before we started a slow approach to reopening. Then mandatory masks. Outdoor dining with proper distancing and limited indoor shopping for nonessential places could have started. Then wait two weeks to see where things were then open a little more if we weren't seeing a sharp uptick in cases.

 

Oh, c'mon. Both Florida and Texas resisted shutting down, dragged their feet about it, refused to mandate masks. Then they reopened at the very front of the line to do so. There were plenty of predictions that doing so would result in exactly what is happening there now. You can throw in that Florida was jiggering the numbers to boot. They all but refused to shut down and did the absolute minimum that they could get away with.

I don't know of a single state who actually met the various requirements that the CDC had set to begin reopening. They just did it anyhow, largely because voters were tired of it and wanted to get out of the house.

Compare to say Michigan, who was getting slammed at a time when both of those were still relatively under control. Their governor caught hell about shutting down and keeping the lid on as long as possible, but she held the line.

Results, in 7 day new cases per 100k population.

Florida - 313
Texas - 210
Mich - 38

% change, last 7 days.

Florida - +34%
Texas - +31%
Mich - +5%


After what happened to New York and New Jersey, we knew how bad it could be. We could see what they did to fight it off and the results of doing so. The jackasses who based their decisions on politics and what Trump was saying are now paying the price and will likely be forced into another shutdown. I said it at the time and will repeat it - not shutting down and staying shut down long enough meant that when businesses reopened those businesses spent their reopening seed money. If they have to shut down again many will not have the capital to try it again. They re-opened too early and as a result their customers were not out there spending their money at risk of catching Covid. They opened too many businesses which were not distancing, disinfecting, or requiring masks, and so they had bars full of people drinking, dancing, making out, and not being cautious. The result was a far bigger infection to endure.

Trump is doing the same thing now, pushing for the schools to open as normal, threatening to cut funding for those who do not hold traditional face to face classes. Again, it does not require a degree in epidemiology to predict that the schools will become a source of infections passed among the children and spread to the teachers, other staff, parents and grandparents. It is already happening in some university settings, where frat houses have become hot spots for infection because they're partying like it was 1999. It's not, it's 2020, and if you don't modify your behavior you'll acquire the year's signature affliction.

Either we get very serious, to the point of enforcing the various quarantine, distancing and masks, and disinfecting guidelines, or we'll continue having repeated spikes and outbreaks until there is an effective vaccine. I don't care who tells you that one will be found by the end of the year, no one knows how long that will take. Might be six months, might be four years, might not happen at all.

I don't think that it is arguable that we're doing what it takes to break the virus, not when you compare our stats with the rest of the world's results.