The "Corona" Season

What if we don't have an available vaccine... ever? (See HIV... or the normal flu that keeps changing every year, so the vaccines have to keep changing accordingly and we keep experiencing waves of a "new version" of the virus).

 

WRT Eddie's musings....I personally think that college athletics will return, but not until 2021. This is because I do not think that much of anything will get back to what we have been considering "normal" until there is a good vaccine for this virus. Unless there is a miracle, we won't see an effective vaccine until 2021.

In the mean time, we will see the expected surge in the May-June time frame, and then maybe a lull followed by another (maybe bigger) wave in the late fall. This wave and lull pattern will continue until an effective vaccine is produced in quantities that will allow all people in the country to get it. I'm sure hoping that we'll see this vaccine sooner, but I think it will be in the first few months of 2021.

 

The current projections by epidemiologists fit your outlook. The flatten the curve approach the U.S. is currently quasi-attempting (little or no real enforcement) pushes this out considerably longer in time.

Summer Olympics doubtful. World Athletics president said on Sunday. "An Olympic Games in July this year is neither feasible nor desirable." The Canadian Olympic Committee recommended a full year postponement.

Hopefully scientists and/or doctors find effective treatment options and/or a safe/effective vaccine that shortens the impact of the pandemic.

 

I'm a "the glass is half full" kind of guy and not a "the glass is half empty" so I certainly hope that you're wrong that collegiate athletics will not return until 2021. I am hopeful that there will be a fall season this year. It is too early to tell at this point what is going to happen but a lot of it will be determined by the course of action that our leaders take.

Not to add a political angle here but If they (he) attempts to get life back to normal too quickly as he has hinted that he will, it could be a big setback. There can't be a arbitrary date or a "packed churches on Easter" proclamation that determines when things get back to normal. The virus itself is going to determine when life can get back to normal. To attempt to do anything else could be devastating and lead to a much longer recovery than we might otherwise see. The harm to the economy and the loss of life will be horrendous. <steps off of soapbox>

I would be really surprised if Lloyd and Krieger hang around. I do believe, though, that there are a few college players, and recent college players that were in the latest draft, that could be in the mix. Vlatko is going to need to reevaluate the pool for '21.

As an aside, sports like track and field, where athletes can change and develop so rapidly, are going to be more affected than soccer is. Generally there are only three athletes per country per event in T&F. For some of those athletes '20 is at their limit from a physiologic and there is really no way that they'll be able to hold their peaks to '21.

 

Those are massive cuts. Would expect some teams could be suspended for a year, or possibly be cutting teams all together. Haven’t heard yet about layoffs or employees being furloughed but have to think that discussion will occur as this gets prolonged (it will go well past Easter). Wonder during this time what public state schools will get their respective government support and how deeply funded private schools are. These are dark and uncertain times.

 

This is depressing. Specific mention of negative outcomes for women’s sports, including decreased roster sizes and possible cutting of sports all together. Places that rely on basketball for revenue will be affected the most.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ncaa-s...8dJzcCUuZFdMD4QpiO3Wjt3hEVAI-8ryThOk_YFVcQ9K4

 

I don't know: I, for one, think that in a lot of states where CV is not a major problem, and I'd say there are about 30 in that category, you could have soccer teams playing against one another in 6-8 weeks and have very little chance of anybody getting this virus from another player. COULD it happen? Sure, but the odds would be extremely small assuming all the players had been fine/asymptomatic for weeks (and no one has just joined the team after moving from NYC or Chicago!) At some point soon standards will have to be established about when it is safe to resume normal or quasi-normal activities--and they may vary by state. Let's say you are a state with 5 million people and 160 cases right now, with little or no rise in the number for weeks. How long are you going to maintain social distancing? If authorities want to be super cautious, you could have no sports of any kind for another 12 months--but the disruptions and complications and costs would be huge. l live in a state with 8.5 million people and, I think, 420 or so cases of CV. We had low numbers for a while, then they shot up over a two-week period and have over the last week leveled off, I believe. Of course, if one player had the virus but showed few if any symptoms, he or she could spread the virus to many other people. But if we were to let that possibility rule, we'll all be picking our noses and sitting at home for months yet. I'm not at all suggesting that all the games/sports should begin again, and I damn sure don't want to sound anything like Trump, but at some point fairly soon the experts will have to engage in some serious cost/benefit analysis--and not just for sports, obviously.

 

The above article didn’t mention public health concerns, which are legit and obvious and still many factors unknown. It was about revenue. If the $ isn’t there, then the $ isn’t there. $600 million to a cut to $225 million is massive. That will affect everyone and programs will be looking at roster sizes, coaches salaries, equipment, travel, suspending or maybe even cutting programs, etc. to determine how financially they can be sustainable.

But if you do want to look at it from a health perspective, consider how college football and the NFL could be affected: https://collegefootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2020/03/27/college-football-kirk-herbstreit-shocked/. Don’t want to be too negative but I can tell you there is no program that will risk student-athletes contracting the coronavirus and losing lives so they can play a game.

 

The virus is going to need to be the determining factor for when we get back to a sense of normalcy. There can't be an arbitrary date in which we say "in 6 weeks we will resume....." The situation is going to need to be evaluated and reevaluated on a near daily basis. Also, this virus, as is the case with many viruses, spreads exponentially. If we want to get it under control one state can't be doing one thing while another does something different. There needs to be consistency across the country.

I agree that the costs, disruptions, and complications of shutting things down are huge. The alternative, though, in trying to get back to life to soon, could be far more costly to life and the economy.

Being without sports absolutely sucks. Though in the grand scheme there are things in life that are much more important than sports.

 

Great points.

One counter to the "student-athletes contracting the coronavirus and losing lives" argument is the fact that the early data we have appears to indicate younger people cope with the virus better than other age groups. The death rate for a young person is very low. Hopefully that holds true as we get more data.

In the USA, as of March 18, a similar age-pattern for COVID19 was observed by the @CDCgov. Among 2,449 cases, with 123 below age 19, there were no deaths in that young age group. https://t.co/VbUC9CiPwY 19/ pic.twitter.com/3O5kFdKOxX

— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) March 28, 2020

A counter to the current zero death rate though is brought up by Cristakis: "Of course, with 100,000’s of people infected in USA, there will be some cases of young people dying. And they will get news coverage" which supports your point.

 

So true. Needed to be done months ago. The virus spread for months with very little limits. It is very likely that millions are already infected if over 100K in the US tested positive today. Now the costs are exponentially higher.

Or maybe not? Economists, philosophers, epidemiologists, etc... are debating these issues. The general economic argument is "we don't shut down the economy during the flu season to save 80K people" and the global economy growing saves lives and raises the standard of living for all. Here's a chart that shows the avg lifespan increase of countries over the last 200 years:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/chart-of-day-life-expectancy-200-years/
Amazing to slide the dates back and forth and see the remarkable changes in lifespan for 3rd world countries from the 1920s to today.

Many outside of academia believe a pandemic is not the time to have these debates.

Really takes us all to the trolley dilemma:

http://theconversation.com/the-trolley-dilemma-would-you-kill-one-person-to-save-five-57111

So difficult to answer in real-time with such limited and ever-evolving data.

 

Developing some sort of drug / treatment regimens could be another goal and probably the one we need to get back to normal sooner rather than later.

 

.

That isn't quite what herd immunity is. Strictly speaking, herd immunity is protection from disease in a group, due to a large enough proportion of the population having immunity to prevent the disease from spreading from person to person, It would not be necessary for everyone to get SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)

There are a lot of different types of coronaviruses. This current coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is related to SARS-CoV that originated in China in the early 2000s. SARS-CoV was a much more deadly virus than this current virus but was not as easily transmitted. It was eventually contained and there was not a vaccine developed. I have an inkling that there will not be a vaccine developed for this latest coronavirus either and that it will eventually be contained through herd immunity.

FWIW, it has been suggested recently that having the antibody may not necessarily make someone immune. There have been reports in China that soe have become afflicted after recovering. This is obviously grim news. There are still a lot of unknowns and we are leaning new information every day.

 

Fauci said today that he would be anything that people are immune once they have had it.

https://www.godanriver.com/video/ne...deo_0f1bd253-e87d-55f2-9a7d-a1acc545cc83.html

 

I hope he is right, but Fauci is guessing, just like everyone else. So far his guesses have not been correct.

Here is what Dr Fauci said January 27, 2020. Watch the video

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/nihs-dr-anthony-fauci-efforts-233728273.html

He said the CDC's responsive effort has "really worked" and isolated the 5 covid patients in the U.S., no secondary transmissions and it was safe to fly. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Leaders make mistakes and I generally buy the narrative that he is a good man amid questionable characters. At the same time this was one of the worst things he could have told the American public to protect them in January. One only has to look where we are now to see what a colossal blunder that was.

To his credit, he does appear to analyze the data and correct course as more information comes in, which is imperative. But I don't put a lot of weight in his bets as they have so far been off by a magnitude of a million or so.

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/confirmed-coronavirus-cases-almost-meaningless-123550415.html

“The numbers(CONFIRMED CASES) are almost meaningless,” says Steve Goodman, a professor of epidemiology at Stanford University.

“Right now we are floundering in a sea of ignorance about who is infected and the fate of people who are infected,” he says.

Goodman says he’s skeptical that anyone knows the death rate of this disease since we don’t know the true rates of infection.

We probably can’t responsibly stop lockdowns by Easter, but we may know enough by then to start to think about the timing and nature of an exit strategy.

Hope this person is correct that we can have an "exit strategy" soon.

 

Fauci is in a position in which he needs to be diplomatic. I have reservations about a lot of what he says because I often don't know if it is what he thinks or if he is walking the political tightrope and merely putting out what it is that the administration wants him to say. I would like to hear his thoughts "off the record."

Remember that we have a president that is petulant and gets triggered very easily. I'm sure that Fauci's words are very measured and he is always on guard against catching the wrath of the president.

When I first read this I was surprised to hear an epidemiologist use the term "death rate" when referring, what I assume to be, the percentage of people that die that are afflicted with COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2). Strictly speaking, the death rate would be the number of people that die divided by the total population. That is why you will hear people say that the death rate for seasonal influenza is higher than that of COVID-19. Technically they are correct but they are also trying to obfuscate the facts by downplaying how dangerous COVID-19 really is.

COVID-19 is many times more virulent than the seasonal flu is. As such, it has a much higher death to case ratio when compared to the flu. There is such a conflation of facts and statistics relating to COVID-19 and that is one of the reasons why there is so much confusion about it.

I would like to qualify some of what I mentioned above about herd immunity and immunization. Here is that quote -

One thing to look at is the REPRODUCTION NUMBER (Ro). The higher the Ro, the more contagious a disease is. Also, the higher the Ro, the higher percentage of vaccine coverage that is needed.

Measles was very contagious and had an Ro ranging 12-18. Vaccine coverage that is needed ranges from 92% to 94% to meet the herd immunity threshold. At the other end is seasonal influenza with a Ro of 1.4 to 4 and corresponding vaccine percentages of 30-75% to have herd immunity There is disparity in the numbers based on variances in studies.

The early studies coming out of China had pretty high Ro numbers of 6.31 to 7.23 at a 95% confidence interval. If those numbers were to have held across the globe, it could be assumed that somewhere around 85% of the population would need to be immunized or have the antibody to attain the herd immunity threshold. I am basing this on the fact that similar diseases had similar numbers:
Diphtheria Ro = 6-7 Immunization needed for herd immunity = 85%
Rubella 6-7 83-85%
Smallpox 5-7 80-85%

As things have settled down somewhat, further studies have shown the Ro to be in the range of 1.4 to 4,39 at a 95% CI. The average Ro appears to be somewhere around 3.28. There is so much speculation about COVID-19 and many unknowns but it the Ro of 3.28 is compared against the Ro range of influenza (1.4-4 with a corresponding vaccine/antibody percentage of 30 to 75% for herd immunity to be realized) it can possibly be deduced that somewhere around 60 to 65% of the population will need to be immunized of get the antibody for the herd immunity threshold to be reached.

As I said, there are a lot of unknowns and it is unknown if the Ro will continue to trend downward or remain static. I'm hoping for the best.

 

Around 60% is what they are targeting here in the Netherlands indeed ...

 

I am hopeful that there will be fall '20 collegiate sports. But I have been wondering that if the fall seasons for sports happen to be canceled, what will happen with eligibility and scholarship limits. There is going to be havoc, IMHO.

I would guess that most seniors will just chalk it up as a loss and forego the last year of eligibility that they have. There are going to instances, though, in which there are going to be 5th year seniors and graduate students playing at universities other than where they received their undergraduate degrees from - provided, of course, that the field of study would allow them to play a collegiate sport. The impact will probably be most felt by pointyball teams. I am not sure what the impact would be for men's and women's soccer.If this happens it will also have big implications on the recruiting of high school kids.

FWIW, there is already some precedent on the issue as the NCAA has decided to extend eligibility to student-athletes affected by COVID-19:

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources...ligibility-student-athletes-impacted-covid-19

Not everyone is happy with the decision of the NCAA and below is an editorial from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that addresses some of those concerns. The added scholarship limits could cost a school hundreds of thousands of dollars more than normal.

https://www.post-gazette.com/sports...ng-sport-senior-athletes/stories/202003310116

 

I just went back and read your post.

I am of the opinion that it is likely that the possibility exists that there will not be a vaccine developed and if/when it is developed, that we may not see this current strain of coronavirus again. As I mentioned previously, there are many unknowns.

There are a lot of strains of coronaviruses but as of now, there are 7 that can be considered to be "human" coronaviruses. The coronaviruses that will affect humans are the α-coronaviruses and ß-coronaviruses. Some of those are mild cause symptoms that are relatively benign and are akin to the common cold while others are much more severe.

Those coronaviruses that are more benign in nature are OC43 (humans and cattle), HKU1 (humans and mice), 229E (humans and bats), NL63 (humans, civets, and bats). Most of these will more than likely result in nothing more than what would be similar to a common cold with accompanying upper airway symptoms but can develop into pneumonia or other problems, particularly those that might be immunocompromised.

The coronaviruses that are more severe in nature are all ß-coronaviruses.

Those are Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV or just MERS for short). MERS is particularly dangerous and has a death to case ratio of 37%. There have been outbreaks of it in 2012, 2015, and 2018. Thankfully it is not easily transmittable and there have been less than 3000 cases in total.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV) had an outbreak from 2002-2004 and had a fatality rate of around 9%. It also was not easily transmittable and there have only been a little more than 8000 cases.

Our current coronavirus is SARS-CoV-2 and as of the time that I am writing this, there are 885,221 worldwide cases with 44,212 deaths giving a death-to-case ratio of roughly 5%. The United States, at this time, stands at 189,711 cases, 4099 death (≈ 2.2%). There are going to big swings in those numbers due to increased testing, etc.

I'm hoping that we do, indeed, get a vaccine but there is a real possibility that there will be a new coronavirus before that happens. We are going to learn a lot of lessons out of all of this - some good and some not so good.

 

Here it is. Hopefully I'm not chastised for this:

• Paul Zeise: NCAA made wrong call on the eligibility of spring-sport seniors
  
  
  
  PAUL ZEISE
  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
  pzeise@post-gazette.com
  
  
  MAR 31, 2020
  
  4:10 PM
  
  
  The NCAA usually comes under fire for making decisions and rulings that seem to be contrary to what is in the best interest of the student-athletes. On Monday, though, the NCAA made a decision that would seem to be in the best interest of student-athletes — but I actually think they got it wrong.
  
  The NCAA ruled that seniors who play spring sports will be granted an extra year of eligibility. That is obviously because they aren’t going to have a season, as spring sports have been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It seems like a perfectly reasonable and fair ruling and one that is the best way to handle the situation.
  
  I completely disagree, though, and think it was the kind of bad decision that is made under pressure. The NCAA didn’t want to be the bad guy. The NCAA didn’t want to come off as cruel and thoughtless and there is no question that was a part of why they decided what they did. It is the middle of a pandemic and it would have been a really tough thing to announce that all those seniors who lost their final year of eligibility would need to get on with their life’s work.
  The problem is the unintended consequences of this decision are going to create more havoc and headaches than any school, coach or student-athlete should have to deal with, considering all that is going on with the world right now.
  
  
  
  John McGonigal
  Pitt student-athlete president Chris Gomez offers perspective on NCAA's eligibility decision
  The NCAA should have said “this is a really awful situation and we feel bad for the seniors who lost their final season of eligibility but they have all had three years of experience as a student-athlete and it is in everyone’s best interest if they all move on now.”
  
  That sounds cruel and heartless, but it isn’t. These are not normal circumstances. This isn’t some situation that happens all the time or even frequently. In fact, this is a situation that none of us have ever been in before.
  
  Everyone is going through hardships at this point, and everyone is making sacrifices. And if anything, this is a wonderful time to teach a bright group of students who are heading into the real world the most important lesson of all: Life isn’t always fair.
  Now, you might ask, what difference does it make if these seniors are granted another year? On the surface, it seems like a no-brainer but most things that look too good to be true, usually are.
  
  Let’s start with the fact that this pandemic is going to cause — and already has caused — financial struggles for colleges and universities. The NCAA already announced its distribution to schools would be almost $400 million less than it anticipated because of things like the cancellation of the NCAA tournament.
  
  This is going to force schools to come up with more money for financial aid and scholarships in order to accommodate an entire class getting another season. There are some reserve funds that could be dipped into, but college administrators have already talked about how they will likely be strained by all that is going on.
  
  The NCAA waived scholarship limits for spring sports in order to accommodate all the returning seniors. But there is also a little caveat that schools can reduce or eliminate the financial aid for returning seniors. And that is a terrible decision because it means coaches will now have to make tough choices about whom to give money or not.
  
  
  
  Ralph D. Russo
  NCAA to give spring sport athletes extra year of eligibility
  Also, coaches just recruited whole classes of freshmen to come in and fill holes left by graduation. Now there is no graduation and we will have rosters overloaded with players.
  
  The sophomores and especially the juniors who waited for their turn behind older players and were ready to step into starting roles next year, now what? Do they get an extra year of eligibility too?
  
  I have three children who played college athletics, one whose NCAA tournament dreams went up in smoke by the COVID-19 pandemic, so I am very sympathetic to the cause of student-athletes. I know it is an awful situation.
  
  Nothing about what we are going through, though, isn’t awful. There is a lot of pain and suffering already and a lot more to come. We shouldn’t be adding to the financial burdens of athletic departments, causing more stress for coaches and administrators or pushing a problem of overcrowded rosters and players not getting their fair shot a year down the road.
  
  The NCAA is right more than it gets credit for, but in this case, it was wrong.
  
  

I agree and those programs that are not fully funded are going to be at a bigger disadvantage. This potentially could have effects that might be felt for a few years and possibly change recruiting tactics. The coaches' jobs could become a lot more difficult.