That's a fair point, though it only accounts for this semester. If the spring semester is the same as the fall, not big deal, but if the spring semester is more heavily in-person, that makes it much more complicated.
Coronavirus Pandemic
That's a fair point, though it only accounts for this semester. If the spring semester is the same as the fall, not big deal, but if the spring semester is more heavily in-person, that makes it much more complicated.
- Cary, IL
I would assume (I know dangerous), that if the Spring semester is more in person, then there is a working vaccine, and it won't be as big of a concern.
If things got pushed to the spring I would think possibly a World Cup model may work.
Conferences set up 10-12 games amongst themselves. Teams then get put in groups and seeded, with heavy lean towards keeping colleges in their regions (illinois, isu, bradley, siu etc...). No teams eliminated yet. Set up 64 groups with 5-6 teams each, play round robin with tie breakets set up. Winner of each group advances to NCAA also have 8-16 play in teams who finished second but made it to play in due to best record and score differential.
At this point all teams have played 15-17 games and will now play a elimination type bracket tourney. Can also set up a lower tier NIT for rest.
This model will give you a delayed start, conference play, regional play (Depaul, Loyola, UIC, Butler, ND, Marquette), bracet tourney. Most teams would finish with 20 games. The finalist around 25.
Would need massive cooperation between NCAA and Conferences. In addition trust, flexiblity.
Conferences set up 10-12 games amongst themselves. Teams then get put in groups and seeded, with heavy lean towards keeping colleges in their regions (illinois, isu, bradley, siu etc...). No teams eliminated yet. Set up 64 groups with 5-6 teams each, play round robin with tie breakets set up. Winner of each group advances to NCAA also have 8-16 play in teams who finished second but made it to play in due to best record and score differential.
At this point all teams have played 15-17 games and will now play a elimination type bracket tourney. Can also set up a lower tier NIT for rest.
This model will give you a delayed start, conference play, regional play (Depaul, Loyola, UIC, Butler, ND, Marquette), bracet tourney. Most teams would finish with 20 games. The finalist around 25.
Would need massive cooperation between NCAA and Conferences. In addition trust, flexiblity.
I really like your idea, but getting the NCAA to deviate from their expectations is probably next to impossible.
The World Cup Model would work if the NCAA could except something different.
I do believe college sports will never be the same. The same can be said for many parts of our lives.
- The Transfer Portal
We didn't "get immune"! We beat these things back with vaccines and public health measures that have improved by leaps and bounds in the last 250 years. It's not like we were just wearing pathogens down in some game of attrition - smallpox killed 300M people in the century we eradicated it.
We didn't really "get immune." A lot of the diseases that were killing people in the past were around for centuries. Bubonic plague still breaks out from time to time. We still have outbreaks of measles. We still get the flu (yes, the 1918 flu pandemic was related to the flu we still get today). In some cases, general improvement in sanitation and medical care has helped. In others it's vaccines. In others the virus mutated into a less deadly variant (as is the typical progression, since killing the host actually means the virus spreads to fewer people it is actually evolutionarily disadvantageous for a virus to be deadly).
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- Champaign
He used one exclamation mark...
But your statement about the common cold justifies his point. We have therapies and other modern-day advancements (good housing and heating for one) that help limit the deadliness of the cold. Yet the common cold still accounts for ~40% of all missed time at work and costs the economy billions of dollars. We've lessened the impact, but we aren't immune -- we just know how to deal with it a little better.
"Immunity" in many of those cases came in the form of increased public health initiatives and the development of vaccines. In 1820 the average life span was 41 years. in 1920 it was 59 years. In 2020 it's 79 years. Of course, in 1820 there were about 1 billion people in the world. In 1920 about 2 billion. Now nearly 8 billion.
The nature of human life is changing because of the number of humans sharing the planet and its limited resources. Viral outbreaks are exacerbated and accelerated in dense populations. COVID-19 may be the first in a line of similar outbreaks.
Will public health initiatives and vaccinations be enough? Who knows? It is what worked before, but this is a different time in history and a different virus.
Deleted member 29907
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I guess I am assuming we get this thing under control by then via 1) People finally understanding we need to wear masks (95% of us) and 2) Hopeful on vaccine. As I've said in other posts, no guarantees, but it seems to be a better potential than what looks like certain calamity now. If you don't think it will get any better in the spring, why do you think it's a good idea now? If it's bad, it's bad. Delaying gives the league a chance to go from bad to good or manageable.
If we don't figure it out in a month or two, we are seriously in trouble as a country. C'mon people take one for the team. Wear a mask and keep your social distance. This is not about personal liberty, it's about personal and community health, jobs and the economy.
- The Transfer Portal
It's been said a lot, but apparently needs to be said again: there are other negative outcomes than death. If you can't grasp this, none of the decision-making around this is going to make sense to you.
According to the National Weather Service, lightning kills an average of 49 people a year in the US and injures in the hundreds. In 2019 lightning killed only 20. COVID is well on its way to hitting 170,000 deaths in the US by the end of this week. So I don't think the odds you're citing are correct.
https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-victims
https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-fatalities19
Heh.
And, to be clear, the reason lightning strikes are not comparable to COVID-19 is because someone struck by lightning cannot infect another person (or 2, or 5, or 10s, or 100s, or thousands when you trace it out) with being struck by lightning. COVID is different. It's different the lightning strikes. It's different than car crashes. It's different than the season flu (for this and other reasons).
Again, there are no easy answers. But the discourse on the subject borders on irrational at times, even in a community I respect and with whom I have shared values. We all need to stop that. Look at the science and objectively verifiable facts, which are not fully known right now, and please factor in that they're not fully known right now. Balance that against the freedoms we value in this country, and rightly so. There is where we'll all find the best course of action.
Ugh, I'm so tired, and I'm not even affected by the virus in ways that many in this country are. I just want to be a part of a community/state/institution/country that functions effectively in a crisis.
Dan, please move if/as appropriate. I don't think I can quote and move. Sorry if I'm missing that function or overstepped.
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I'm not sure where you are getting your numbers. About 2% of the population has contracted Covid so far with 170,000 deaths. The survival rate in the US is actually about 94% which doesnt sound that bad if you dont understand science and math. If you assume 50% of the country contracts covid you can expect 11 million deaths and that's assuming the hospitals are able to keep a steady flow open beds and ventilators. I know people want to get to herd immunity, which sounds nice, but it also requires 60-70% of the population contracting the virus
Your numbers are also misleading.
As of this moment, CDC is reporting
5,119,711 cases
163,651 deaths (implies 3.2% death rate, 96.8% survival rate)
It is also not at all clear whether these cases are unique individuals testing positive, or total tests that tested positive (eg a person who tested positive is quarantined, and re-tested daily (positive) for 14 days, which can inflate the total positive count), or whether they net out false positives when a second test on the same individual is negative. A big part of this problem is that each state is doing its own thing, and reporting in its own way. For instance, I read within the last couple days that data from NY state is effectively all coming from NYC. Yesterday, a friend came over after a visit to the VA hospital for a skin cancer surgery/graft. Before the surgery, they logged him in as covid-positive, so he is treated as such. Then they gave him a covid test, which came back negative in about 10 minutes, I think he said. BUT, he was still in the system as covid-positive.
IMO, more important than covid tests are antibody tests on well people. Here are a couple I bookmarked from a while back:
https://spectator.us/stanford-study-suggests-coronavirus-more-widespread-realized/
https://reason.com/2020/04/26/miami...ons-exceed-confirmed-cases-by-a-factor-of-16/
The implication here is that maybe 1 in 16 (or less) people who get covid would ever even know it, and bother to get tested. If you use this factor of 16, the death rate above goes down from 3.2% to 0.2%. The US Population in 2019 was 328 million, so 5.2 million positive tests times the factor of 16 would infer that there would be 83.2 million people in the US that have had covid already, or 25.4% There is no concensus on what percentage qualifies as herd immunity, but the lowest I have heard is 40%. I think we are generating over 50,000 positive tests per day right now, which (using the 16 factor) would get us to 131.2 million positives (40% of 328 million) in 60 days. That would be nice, eh? Beats the ETA for a vaccine by quite a bit. I hope our govt is working this angle hard, but I haven't really heard much lately. If any of you have, please let us know.
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- Omaha, Nebraska
I don't have any major points to bring to the table in this discussion, but I will say that I have no idea how accurate testing numbers actually are. My wife's coworker and her husband went to a Test Nebraska (the one set up by the state) location to get tested and were put on a waiting list. After a 4 day wait to be tested, they were notified they were being taken off the wait list. The following day they were notified that they had tested positive... having never actually been tested! So two completely false positives were probably reported. Who knows how often this type of thing happens.
Deleted member 716187
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https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Sorry, the 6% came out of the closed case numbers, not including active cases because of course they haven't died yet.
Given that in May, after getting hit harder than any place in the US has been even to this day, antibody testing in New York City residents showed about 24%, I think that 25% estimate is way too optimistic. And the death per million in New York state is about 3.5 times the national death per million btw.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wa...navirus-immunity-us-cdc-study/?outputType=amp
Estimates I've seen peg the national antibody rate in the 7-10% range.
Also I haven't seen that 40% number for herd immunity and would be interested to see where it comes from. Lowest I've seen is 60% and I've seen it as high as 85%. For the sake of argument though let's go with 40% and say we're currently at 10%. With approx 170,000 deaths, if the death rate stays static we're looking at another 510,000 deaths. Even if we take your highly unlikely 25%, getting it up to 40% means another 102,000 deaths. And just for fun, if your numbers are wrong and we're at 10% and it takes 60% to get to herd immunity? Another 850,000 deaths.
It sounds bad when you put it like that. How about this: hundreds of thousands of people will get to go to heaven
Thanks. Some observations in comparing these sources:
I accessed your Worldometer source at 6:13 am my time today, and it lists 241,000 more cases (almost 5% more) and 5,500 more deaths (3.3% more) than the CDC in the US about 12 hours after I got CDC data. At 50,000 cases/day, this is off more than I would accept. Makes you wonder.
Worldometer has about 2,550,000 cases still without an outcome. If there are 50,000 cases added per day, this would be 51 days of cases. This does not make sense, since quarantines last 14 days, and deaths seem to usually be within that range, too. That would infer 1,850,000 of the 2,550,000 cases without an outcome should already have an outcome. Makes you wonder more.
One explanation would be that these are double-counted numbers, eg a sick person gets tested again, just to be sure. If the person comes up positive, it could be a double-count. If you test them multiple times before they are released as healthy, that could cause a large overstatement of the total number of cases. And what happens if the second test is negative? Do they keep the positive? IMO they shouldn't, but I suspect they do. And, since each state (and even each locality) is reporting data differently (how the heck is that allowed to happen??), that makes it hard to properly analyze and make the best decisions.
Another (cynical) explanation would be that since the govt is paying hospitals big money to deal with each positive case...
Lastly, regarding the number of deaths, it would be perhaps most important to know the trends wrt those with at-risk conditions. If cases and deaths continue to be dominated by those with at-risk conditions (probably, but when even the case/death counts are out of whack, who really knows?), then we are not doing enough or doing it well enough to mitigate our at-risk people. And maybe we could be much less concerned about our not-at-risk population, and open things up more.
Otoh, if the cases/deaths are now rising rapidly among healthy, not-at-risk individuals (probably not, but...), then I would be more concerned.
I have even seen up to 90% as a herd immunity number. So that doesn't bode well.
The study you linked mentioned that the antibody results varied widely by state, too. It also quotes one CDC top dog saying actual infections are likely 10 times higher than the number of positive tests. I used 16 in my prior calcs to get to 25% herd level, so the 10 factor would yield 16%. But, what if the 5+ million cases has substantial double counting, and is only 3.5 million? Using the 16 factor, we'd only be at 17% and using the 10 factor we'd only be at 11% herd level.
I couldn't find the link I saved, but there was some small town (I think in Wyoming) that had next to no cases, but they did an antibody test and came back with some very high number of people with antibodies, like over 50%. Makes no sense.
Anyway, I am in favor of better data and ongoing antibody studies while we await the vaccines, and I will continue to wear my mask in public.
Just a note on using CDC. CDC is way behind. On their own FAQs they talk about how they validate their numbers with a confirmation process with each jurisdiction. To me that sounds like a lengthy process. Worldometers seems to just take the info the states release and plug them in. This means Worldometer's numbers are more up to date.
It seems most reputable news organizations are using Johns Hopkins numbers, which are also validated but seem to be more up to date and are much closer to Worldometers numbers than the CDCs. Not sure if the move to have numbers reported directly to the White House rather than the CDC has also affected the accuracy but I wouldn't be surprised.
Deleted member 29907
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If you assume they made their decision based on the facts they all saw, but came to a different conclusion, why would a parent or player's opinion/desire change that conclusion? New facts/findings could more plausibly change the conclusions (on either side of the 2/5 , 3/5).
Keep wearing a mask (and read this journal article from July: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768532).
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Does anyone remember a few years ago when the University took out a very specific insurance policy that would cover an event leading to a massive decline in Chinese student enrollment? The dean of business looks like a genius now, that guy should get a commission.
https://www.axios.com/university-illinois-chinese-students-4c1161fe-f17a-4d71-aec8-08ed344cf82d.html
https://www.axios.com/university-illinois-chinese-students-4c1161fe-f17a-4d71-aec8-08ed344cf82d.html