Saturday 7 Mar 2020

Apropos of nothing, I think MLS needs to suspend the 8 charter flight leg rule until the COVID19 situation stabilizes.

Columbus, for example, is playing in Seattle today. They flew in on a charter last night and will leave straight from the stadium to the airport afterwards.

The distance would particularly suggest that this was always a game they would charter to but dragging any team through any airport right now is a risk a lot of people would prefer to skip.

But as long as the 8 leg limit is in place, teams will have to decide whether to burn them early in the season on shorter flights.

 

you do realize that the flu has caused over 10 K deaths in the USA as of early February and you don't see the panic and shut-downs of events, schools, sporting happenings, etc

the panic over the coronavirus is completely out of whack for what is really happening- wuhan numbers are raidly decreasing and things will be back to normal by april- 3 400 deaths in the world (3 000 in china)- only a few have died in the USA and those are people with compromised health

the sky aint falling ! people need to get educated and stop panicking

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/the...cross-us-as-world-frets-over-coronavirus.html

 

Oswaldo Alanís fee kick goal in the final seconds of injury time was a thing of beauty. An absolutely rarity since I've followed MLS.

I felt privileged to be sitting up in the stands above the goal. The excitement throughout the stadium was electric. I also hope he continues to improve!

 

I can't get that link to work. Maybe this one?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/au.spo...e-love-iraq-whitecaps-defender-223413511.html

 

from my point of view it seems more deadly then flu (by a factor of 10), seems to spread easier, and really is the opposite of contained here in the USA (or most places for that matter). If you have people with underlying health issue at home like I do. Or if you’re elderly, this is a real concern.

Sure the flu kills people too but that’s already built into our lives. This is new.

I don’t understand what’s gained by downplaying the risk.

 

I agree. There's some residual resistance to the flu since it comes through every year in slightly different forms. This stuff is new and more deadly. It's scary how fast it's spread all over the world.

 

All true more or less but you're missing the point.

No, COVID19 has not killed anything like 10k people here

The point is that we'd like to keep it that way. If your position is to just ignore it and let it run it's course, well, that's one way to go.

A dumb way, sure, but a way.

 

I had a similar thought. From a business standpoint, it may be prudent to offer an additional level of protection to the players as there is a potential of sidelining an entire team.

I'm not an alarmist. Somehow I survived a 12-hr international flight from Egypt last week. And this was with the knowledge that adjacent to our gate was a flight to Bangkok where at least 50% of the passengers were wearing a mask of some sort (even though not really effective).

My work though did suggest that I telework for a little while and not immediately show up to the office (where of course we have open, bench-type seating).

 

China also instituted very draconian measures to stop the spread, or things could have been much worse.

Flu fatality rate is 0.1%. Coronavirus is currently hovering aroung 3.4%. Plus, there are flu shots, no coronavirus vaccine at the moment.

Austin cancelled SxSW. Columbus mostly banned spectators from the Arnold Classic. Precautions should be taken.

 

Not trying to downplay the threat, but the fatality rate is just a function of the number of infected people. There's a good possibility the number of "actual infected" is wayyyy higher than "confirmed infected".
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https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-05/flu-killed-more-people-coronavirus-covid-19

"However, experts said the observed COVID-19 death rate is almost certainly an overestimate.

That’s because the only people being tested for the coronavirus are those showing symptoms of infection. There could be just as many people — and perhaps even more — who have the virus but show no signs of infection, or have symptoms so mild they were not tested.

Yang said it’s certainly possible that the true number of people who are infected is 10 times greater than the number of people who have confirmed cases of COVID-19. In that case, the true fatality rate would be closer to 0.2%, he said."

 

Why? The season could be suspended by next weekend because of the coronavirus, but we can't discuss it on news and analysis?

 

I agree that the data indicates this new coronavirus is deadlier, by an order of magnitude, than the standard flu we've had this year. However, the data shows the opposite as far as spread goes. This year's standard flu seems more easily spread than the coronavirus, by an order of magnitude. If we can trust the Chinese leadership, the first cases were apparent in December. Worldwide the number of apparent cases is now a chunk over 100,000. Give our influenza a three month run, and the world has tens of millions of cases.

This is, of course, fortunate. If the Wuhan virus was as transmittable as the Spanish Influenza then we'd our partying would be far too much like 1918.

 

This is why this "panic" is pretty damn important. The idea that its "just the flu" or "no worse than the flu" is a complete misread of the danger we're in if this is left to run unchecked:

1236721200291655680 is not a valid tweet id

Health care systems need to prepare for spike in patients due to #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 #coronavirus. Some will be worried well, but many may need ICU-level care. In the meantime, we need to do everything possible to buy ourselves time and #FlattenTheCurve. https://t.co/XMB8hdtC9D pic.twitter.com/5dQrIKx5kf

— Céline Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA 🇺🇦 (@celinegounder) March 8, 2020

Dr. Celine Gounder, beyond being an infectious disease specialist, professor, and (as I learned today) fellow Husky, also has a soccer connection. She's married to Grant Wahl.

Now that doesn't mean running around and buying 7 Costco size packs of toilet paper and 12 flats of water makes sense. But anything we can do to flatten that curve and stretch this pandemic out over time is going to save lives.

 

This post is strange...in another thread you said the coronavirus is no big deal.

and again

 

Perhaps the quotation marks indicate that when you say panic is pretty damn important you really mean something other than panic.
Here is a dictionary definition of the noun: "Panic: sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly unthinking behavior."

So fear and anxiety are natural, but if we allow it to be uncontrollable it leads to rashness, to stupidity, to destructive and self-defeating behavior.

Between this "Panic" you laud, and blase' dismissal as "no worse than the [ordinary] flu", is focused attention on learning what we are facing, on action as rapid as possible to minimize the spread of the contagion, and on a fixed determination to mitigate its effects. If we are to succeed at this, the last thing we can do is to "panic first, face reality later".

As I said before, in other posts, it would be of ugly interest to discover how 21st Century modernity would behave before an epidemic much more lethal and contagious than the Wuhan virus...say the Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919.