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

if you're locked up with toddlers for two to three months, some minds will change about abortion

 

No, you’re wrong. This part rather makes sense:

Conversations with experts painted a picture of what exactly it would take to make these sports vacuums a reality. Before any of this can begin, every person who would have access to the facilities will need to be isolated separately for two weeks to ensure that no infection could enter. That’s players and coaches, athletic trainers and interpreters, reporters and broadcasters, plus housekeeping and security personnel. No one can come in or out. Food will have to be delivered. Hotel and stadium employees will have to be paid enough to compensate for their time away from their families. Everyone onsite will have to be tested multiple times during this initial period.

That brings us to the question of testing. At the moment, screening is scarce enough that many healthcare facilities cannot even clear their employees. Asymptomatic professional athletes are not high on anyone’s priority list. But here Carl Bergstrom, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Washington, offers some hope. Testing is not technologically difficult, he says. There are supply chain issues—we will eventually run out of the long Q-tips required for the nasopharyngeal swab, for example—and questions of bureaucracy, but he is cautiously optimistic that we might have ubiquitous COVID-19 testing by the end of May.

All right, so the 14-day period is over and everyone has tested negative at least twice. Now they are allowed to begin spending time around one another—but not too much time. If one person gets it, he or she will begin spreading it immediately, so everyone will have to continue practicing social distancing. That probably means using a new ball for each play. It probably means seating players in stands rather than on benches or in dugouts. It certainly means banning high-fives.

All personnel must continue to be tested daily. We will be unlikely to have enough rapid testing by then, so they will probably have to settle for the tests that take several hours to produce results. That means the testing will probably run a day behind.

After each game, everyone will need to be transported back to the hotel. If the NBA plays in Las Vegas, as has been proposed, the personnel might be able to walk from the court to their rooms. If MLB plays at spring training sites in Arizona, as it is considering, the league will have to hire bus drivers—who will, of course, also have to be isolated. And then once they are back in their rooms, every person involved will have to follow rules. You can’t take your kids to the park. You can’t run to the grocery store. You can’t invite your Bumble match up to your room. These are humans, so the leagues would surely require insurance: That means security personnel (another group that would need to isolate) or invasive cell phone tracking (good luck getting that by the players’ union). If your wife gives birth or your father dies of cancer and you want to be there, that’s another 14-day reentry period.

And ethically, Bergstrom says, “you need informed consent.” That means everyone has to opt in and no one’s paycheck can hang in the balance.​

So does this part:

Even if we can start this, we almost certainly can’t finish it. Just look at South Korea and Japan, which both believed they had the outbreak under control and have since pushed back the start dates of their professional baseball seasons. In response to ESPN's reporting on the MLB biodome scenario this week, former Medicare and Medicaid head Andy Slavitt tweeted, “I’m as big a sports fan as anybody, but this is reckless. Leagues need to follow the science & do the right thing.”​

There will be no organized sports as we have known them until there is a vaccine. Inarguable among the sane.

Get used to a whole lot of iRacing.

 

That guy’s not from Emory for one thing.

For another, asking “why” is a perfectly reasonable question there. Just like “you shouldn’t wear masks” was wrong. And the WHO has been wrong about China lying its ass off. And and we didn’t know about the loss of taste and smell being symptoms right away.

Science evolves. It changes all the time. Just think about the example of coughing on lettuce. It’s ludicrous. People are doing that every hour of every day at every grocery store. Why would such a thing, or even one person testing positive, shut down a league for epidemiological purposes? Didn’t shut down Congress. It didn’t shut down British government when Boris Johnson fell ill. You don’t need a medical degree to ask why.

 

The writer presents as fact, irrefutable fact, that it must be done this way, and only this way, based on three interviews. Also presumes an unbalanced worldview that even one positive test shuts down the league for 2 weeks. Now, to be clear, that may be what people decide to do because we’ve decided not to entertain any other worldviews. There’s always that. And, as I mentioned in my very first post On this thread, it won’t surprise me if that’s the tack we take sans vaccine. That doesn’t mean that’d be my prescription, but I think we might conclude that as a result of how things are decided today.

 

Ok. The author of the quote in question is from the University of Washington. I stand corrected.
As to the larger point, what qualifications in an expert would satisfy you? An infectious diseases doctor with an MBA as well? The issue is whether throngs of people can safely congregate. The nuances of balance sheets? Not so much.

 

Don’t care about quals really. And I’m not saying I disagree with him.

I’m saying the reporter didn’t ask why, and didn’t place the idea into context. The guy didn’t have to explain his work.

My sense, his “why” is a value judgment, the reporter may very well agree with the value judgement, so it stands.

 

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel was on MSNBC today saying concerts and sporting events would be the last things to come back
He said they couldn’t come back until we had a vaccine
His target date is fall — 2021

 

Nobody in journalism wants to see sports disappear. They are not hankering for the negative. If experts' predictions come to pass, many of the people writing and talking about these things will not have jobs in a month or two. It's absurd to suggest things are being written and said over some love of negativity.
In this case, discussing expert opinion makes a clear statement: It values the publication of relevant truth over personal convenience.
If sports are over for another year, the killers will not be the libruhl media. Among living humans in this country, the chief culprits will be Trump and his klan.
Pretty simple what coaches like Saint Dabo of the Upstate and the Mullet of the Plains should say rather than advocating for viewership of OAN:
"As a human, I hope. As a coach, I prepare. As a layman, I defer."

 

It's perfectly OK for coaches to be optimistic. That's their nature, or they couldn't be coaches. But in their professional lives, they're not allowed to differentiate between hope and certitude. This has nothing to do with their professional lives. Why is it hard to say, "I hope and plan that we can get back as soon as possible but of course it's out of my hands." Of course that last phrase is what they can't swallow.

 

Hmmmmmm ...

 

That last phrase or implication is what tapoutastupid, what with all his professional training -- I mean, the guy didn't go to University-6! -- isn't capable of hearing. He operates on too high a plane to bother himself with whether X actually said Y.

 

I covered John Calipari, the national symbol for dirtbag college coaches when he was at UMass. And yeah, he was a huge cheat by NCAA standards then, too. But he actually did care about his players as human beings. He just didn't care about them as college students progressing towards a degree. I haven't taken the time to read the Louisville and Lexington papers about UK basketball during this crisis, but I bet Calipari is at least trying to keep his team safe. Same with Dabo, I'll bet. He doesn't want anyone to get hurt, he just doesn't want to believe it's real. That's human, but also dangerous.