Football or not: it's about the heart
In the midst of the play-or-not discussion, Sports Illustrated published a very interesting report on Sunday about the role of heart issues in determining the future of the college football season. This is serious and it's difficult to dispute the importance of heart issues in the aftermath of an athlete contracting Covid-19.
Read about it: https://www.si.com/college/2020/08/09/ncaa-cardiac-inflamation-coronavirus-myocarditis-concerns
In the wake of this information, given its apparent medical accuracy, it would be surprising for the Big 10 to proceed with games this fall! Of course, the assumption is that the risks of playing are worse than the risks of not playing.
August 11th, 2020 at 12:50 PM ^
Not following my posts, I see.
The season was canceled almost certainly due to liability concerns.
The campus should be closed to slow the spread.
August 11th, 2020 at 12:54 PM ^
Injuries playing football are a much greater occurrence than COVID and would be a much greater liability. I guess your solution would be to just end college football.
August 11th, 2020 at 12:58 PM ^
You know that for a fact? I seriously doubt you do.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:11 PM ^
Yes, I do. We are not observing over 8.1 COVID test positive for every 1000 players tested are we? 8.1 injuries per ever 1000 players is the current number of injuries that occur while playing college football. You can see the stats on injuries straight from the NCAA. https://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/NCAA_Football_Injury_WEB.pdf
August 11th, 2020 at 1:14 PM ^
That is not at all the fact I was talking about and and I think my implication was very clear. Please try to follow.
Football injuries and university liability has a long history.
COVID and university liability? Rather uncharted. You figure out the rest. This isn't hard.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:55 PM ^
You are comparing injuries for an entire season to Covid numbers in early August. You may ultimately be right, but the numbers you offer clearly demonstrate that you don’t have the data to support your assertion?
August 11th, 2020 at 12:50 PM ^
The reason why the argument is getting worse and worse is that your argument no longer makes sense (it really never did). It was always predicated on several stacked fallacies but fear induced a lot of people to stop acting and thinking rationally. It appears that some basic logic is returning to the discourse now.
August 11th, 2020 at 12:57 PM ^
fEaR iNdUcEd
August 11th, 2020 at 12:52 PM ^
Well if everyone will recall the initial "lockdown frenzy" was to "flatten the curve"... seems the goal posts are constantly moving (its the only constant)
August 11th, 2020 at 12:58 PM ^
What the fuck? "Flatten the curve" literally means SLOW the spread.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:06 PM ^
It was to flatten the exponential spread of the virus, which was a possibility back in March and April. Only a few locations had overflowing hospital ICU beds but most of the country was able to handle the volume.
August 11th, 2020 at 2:32 PM ^
Dude you can't just flatten the curve near the peak and then declare mission accomplished, let's open back up! Don't you know how viruses work?
And also, hospitals don't need to be overflowing to be stressed. Way to completely throw healthcare workers under the bus. They're already overstressed, overworked, and undervalued, and it really grinds my gears when some people use "hospital beds" as the only metric that matters. We shouldn't be fucking waiting for overflowing hospitals to do something about it. But that's what we did. So sure, "only a few" overflowed, but in a first-world country that had ample time to prepare that number should be zero. We let New York City get nearly out of hand, and then we didn't learn a thing while other locations are confronting the same problems months later.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:02 PM ^
This is true. We were all good about the initial lock down and were able to flatten the exponential curve and prevented a health care emergency from occurring A large percentage of deaths have occurred from those who are 75 years or older. This population will need to continue to be isolated until a proven vaccine is distributed. Most of us will end up catching this virus over the next couple years and most of us will recover with no major health problems.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:08 PM ^
This is a dangerous post that completely ignores all the areas where the health care system was overwhelmed. The US response has been pretty bad. Not as bad as it could have been, but really bad for the major population centers. I live in LA County.
"Most" is an incredibly misleading term in your post.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:21 PM ^
I don't know man, seems to me a lot of people are in fact demanding zero spread. They won't admit it of course but it seems to be the logical endpoint to what they're actually advocating.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:25 PM ^
Please identify these people and detail their demands specifically.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:43 PM ^
The continued breathless we have to cancel x posts every time anyone anywhere tested positive. There are other examples in this thread but I doubt we're going to come to an agreement on this.
August 11th, 2020 at 2:41 PM ^
Have you noticed that there's been a million cases in the last month? You seem to be claiming people want zero, but then are ignoring the reality of the current situation.
The only things I've seen are generic "slow the spread" posts. If anyone is more specific, it's usually somethign like "get positivity rates below 2%" or "something closer to how Canada and other European countries are doing right now", which for the US would be in the vicinity of thousands of cases per day, not *50,000* cases per day. Nobody is saying we need to be New Zealand before anyone can open up and do things. That's not realistic.
August 11th, 2020 at 12:56 PM ^
As so many of the players and coaches have stated, not having football could actually put the players more at risk of contacting the covid being out and about town, school, closely interacting with their friends and family. People really seem to forget what they were like as teenagers and young 20-somethings!!
August 11th, 2020 at 12:45 PM ^
So LSU and Clemson, who have each had dozens of positives among their players will be having extensive heart tests for each player before they're allowed to practice? Seems this is a massive risk.
August 11th, 2020 at 12:51 PM ^
At least they are having cardio tests after having COVID. If they were normal student body, they would not be tested and be in more danger.
August 11th, 2020 at 12:51 PM ^
Interesting that majority of states are planning for HS football this fall
August 11th, 2020 at 1:06 PM ^
Also interesting that MLB, NHL, NFL, NBA, UFC, MSL, NASCAR, PGA, LPGA, ATP, WTA, F1, Premier League and essentially every other sports league has been able to figure this out. Yet the NCAA and B1G don't have a clue (or desire) to make this happen.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:16 PM ^
lol "figured it out."
Comedy.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:31 PM ^
I would surely love to have college football being played this year and I believe it can be done quite safely for the players. HOWEVER, there is this little thing about universities being first and foremost academic institutions that comes into play here. As a person who (finally) graduated as a nursing major with minors in physical education and biology, there is a very interesting philosophical discussion to be had here.
August 11th, 2020 at 3:21 PM ^
It is indeed. If any other Corporate board of Directors of a business this size had this kind of decision making, it would have been taken over by now, hostile or otherwise.
August 11th, 2020 at 12:53 PM ^
I think what the #letthemplay crowd is objecting to is putting the cart before the horse.
Move forward with camp, start the season. If you start losing enough of the roster to field a competitive team, then pull the plug at that point.
Because let's be honest, if there's an "outbreak" on campus, they're going to send everyone back home and cancel the season anyways. So why not give it a go?
Now, if the university admits they don't have enough tests to track such an outbreak should it occur, that's a different story entirely.
Either way, it should not have gotten to this point without an easily understandable, if/then, yes/no type flowchart. That's why people are angry.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:05 PM ^
We're going to be having this argument about every type of event for a long time. The window to address this well was when we were locked down the first time, but now we're in this hokey-pokey one foot in situation and it's going to be a shit show.
Screw anyone who says this is fear mongering; it's respecting a dangerous situation. I think even now, the powers that be realize what needs to be done but have no interest in taking the PR hit to do it. It's not something for universities or businesses to decide, because partial adoption does nothing. We need to shut everything down, ramp up testing (primarily the speed now) and contact tracing, and get it under control.
No way that happens unless the second wave is even worse than the first, but if we don't do it we're screwed and 1,000+ people will die every day until we have an effective vaccine.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:18 PM ^
New cases are dropping in the sunbelt. Fatalities are a lagging stat but these should start falling. Looking at stats alone, 85 percent + deaths have occurred in the population of those 75 or older. Senior citizens will just have to be locked down and isolated until a proven vaccine is distributed, and it is the responsibility of family members of those senior citizens to keep them isolated.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:24 PM ^
“Sorry, Mom & Dad. We need you to be prisoners in your own home so Michigan can lose to Ohio State.”
August 11th, 2020 at 1:27 PM ^
"We need to shut everything down"
This is completely impossible and is functionally equivalent to the it's all a hoax crowd's plan. This is why we are where we are, there is not a realistic plan anywhere to be found.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:36 PM ^
A number of countries did it, and are enjoying the benefits now. What exactly makes this impossible other than stubbornness?
You don't have to shut down until cases get to zero, you have to shut down until you have the capacity and structure to handle the small outbreaks when they do occur, and we completely ignored that part.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:42 PM ^
Yeah, like China who welded sick people in their apartments to prevent them from leaving, Well Hong Kong and South Korea did lock everyone down and now they are experience a new surge in cases. I guess Sweden is an example of not doing much and they are better off than many countries who had severe lock downs.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:44 PM ^
Name one country that shut everything down and explain how their citizens ate.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:53 PM ^
Are you stuck on the semantics of "everything" here? Fine. Shut *almost* everything down. We did that in Michigan and it worked once already!
We just didn't do all the other work to figure out contact tracing and quick, abundant testing that were needed to appropriately sustain those low levels moving forward.
August 11th, 2020 at 2:06 PM ^
No I'm stuck on the fact that this isn't a plan either and in fact didn't work already otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation.
"We just didn't do all the other work to figure out contact tracing and quick, abundant testing that were needed to appropriately sustain those low levels moving forward."
Yes, that's my point, that would constitute an actual plan.
August 11th, 2020 at 2:30 PM ^
I have no idea what you're arguing about. It didn't work because we didn't do the other stuff. That's the plan I'm suggesting. Lock down like we did before AND do the other stuff too.
Google and Apple have had code on 99% of peoples' phones since the lockdown that could assist with contact tracing. There are places where tests come back quickly (the NBA bubble). This isn't impossible, people just don't have the willpower and sense of communal responsibility to make it happen
August 11th, 2020 at 3:21 PM ^
Platitudes are not plans no matter how many times you want to pretend they are. "Doing the other stuff" requires details and a plan. Getting tests to come back quickly requires details and an actual plan, it doesn't just happen because you said get texts back quicker. A functional lockdown requires details and a plan. The fact that you keep bringing up things we could do proves my point. There are a lot of things we could do, what are we going to do is the question. I have yet to see anyone in a place of leadership propose a feasible plan.
August 11th, 2020 at 3:33 PM ^
You guys aren't really that far off from one another.
August 11th, 2020 at 1:41 PM ^
Not a double blind peer reviewed study. Or this is just anecdotal. So it doesn’t mean squat.
Isn’t this how it works?
August 11th, 2020 at 2:17 PM ^
The one who makes the point in these discussion gets to pick what matters: valid data or anecdotes.
Once it’s been decided, don’t expect it to stay constant.
August 11th, 2020 at 4:36 PM ^
Serious question in light of health concerns:
Why play football at all? Think about concussions.
Might as well be consistent in our caring for others.
August 11th, 2020 at 4:51 PM ^
Because you can't accidentally spread concussions. We've made leaps and bounds in identifying, diagnosing, and preventing concussions over the years. They aren't gone and never will be, but we've reduced them significantly
We have done nothing to slow the spread of COVID and know very little about it. Injuries and viruses are apples and oranges, and are also the difference between an assumed risk and an unreasonable one