The Big Ten Did A Good Job At A Thing
Kevin Warren will never have a moment of peace. The Big Ten announced that the season would be postponed or cancelled, and a bunch of people screamed at him because they wanted their football. The Big Ten announced a return to play based on point of contact testing, and a different set of people furrowed their brows and wrote very serious takes about how this was a Dark Day. Christine Brennan went the furthest:
Note the date: 9/16/20, the day the vaunted Big Ten became the SEC. It choked. It got scared. It sold its soul for football. My @usatodaysports column on the darkest day in Big Ten history: https://t.co/uaWfgpgSqO
— Christine Brennan (@cbrennansports) September 16, 2020
This is wrong for a hundred reasons, but it is far from alone. Jemele Hill has an Atlantic piece, Pat Forde has an SI piece, and Mitch Albom has a Free Press piece that all all have more or less the same premise: the Big Ten returns to the field out of Scrooge McDuck-level greed and for no other reason.
Another common thread in discussions of the return to play on social media is that it says something about the world's misplaced priorities that football will resume when various other things, mostly schools, remain shut down. I'm not going to contest the idea that things are disastrous. This has almost nothing to do with football.
The Big Ten was correct to postpone the season; they're correct to reinstate it.
Isn't this a reversal from your previous position?
Football with daily point of contact testing is an entirely different animal than the existing regimes, as the previous post on this topic explicitly stated:
If you want to do something useful in the hopes of a spring season, advocate for the development of a protocol that uses the recently approved point-of-contact saliva test as a way to have safe football—for everyone, not just athletes—in the spring. Advocate for a nationwide testing system that will get the virus under control.
This is largely because the equation changes from the inevitability that playing football will worsen the pandemic to one where playing is pandemic-neutral.
[After THE JUMP: community spread, priorities, myocarditis]
Will playing cause more community spread?
You can certainly argue that up to this point football activities have caused community spread, including the Big Ten's. It's hard to believe that 30-40% of Wisconsin players and staff have tested positive…
As the Big Ten decides to return, 42 Wisconsin football players and staff have tested positive for COVID, officials say. https://t.co/c3JN5XEwWx
— Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) September 18, 2020
…without 1) much of that transmission being intra-team and 2) intra-team transmission resulting in community transmission. The situation at various southern schools is certainly worse, with LSU and Texas Tech pursuing a herd immunity approach that certainly made local conditions worse and has likely left 10%+ of each playing roster dealing with as yet-unannounced myocarditis issues.
That's bad. The Pac 12 really, truly shut everything down when they made the call, which now makes it difficult or impossible for them to follow the Big 10 back to competition. Bruce Feldman has a piece with various quotes from anonymous coaches and officials:
“I don’t think people know that when the seasons were postponed, the Big Ten and Pac-12 took completely different paths. They kept going like it was still training camp. They kept the same schedule like they were gonna play. We didn’t. Half of our schools couldn’t."
It is fair to say that the Big Ten's approach hasn't been as good for public health so far.
Going forward I don't think that's the case. The Big Ten's announced approach should not have community effects since COVID positive individuals will be found and isolated before they can trigger intra-team transmission. Football players will catch coronavirus by interacting with civilians and then be isolated. They will no longer catch coronavirus from teammates and then go back into the community until test results come back.
There is the possibility someone Rutgers this up—probably Rutgers—but since Big Ten football programs seem to be doing much better than universities as a whole…
…it's clear that the decision to open campuses is much worse than the one to play football.
It's not fair that football players get tests
The number of tests available to football players is not significant when applied to larger testing initiatives. Football players are 0.2% of Michigan's enrollment. There is no situation where the football players getting tests prevents a similarly wide-ranging testing program from being implemented simply because there are 500 other students for every football player.
Testing football players a lot makes sense because it is a small number of students who can undertake activities that matter to many people for various reasons. Any other group in the same situation can and should get similar testing. What is preventing them is not football but an incredible society-wide decision to be stupid assholes and not fund things like this:
#a2schoolboard Jenna Bacolor says that paying 4 dollars a week to test each student is cost prohibitive. Fails to tak into account the cost of children losing their school year, which is, um, a lot more than 4 dollars a week.
— Mister Peregrine (@PeregrineMister) September 17, 2020
The problem isn't that people care enough about football to make it work. It's that they don't seem to care about anything else.
Michigan in particular has THREE POINT NINE BILLION dollars in unrestricted endowment funds. They just do not care to use them. Michigan will only fund sufficient tests for safety when it provides a direct benefit to the bottom line. This is not a football issue; football just happens to be in the very narrow band of activities in which testing equals more money.
If that's your point, okay. The university administration has been comically inept and seems like every other band of diseased mandarins running institutions into the ground. You could fire every last one of them and I'd be fine with it. But the solution to "football players have good testing and nobody else does" is not "nobody has good testing."
What about myocarditis?
Myocarditis is likely to sideline a number of Big Ten players. The league has a mandatory 21-day sit-out period for anyone who tests positive and is going to do everything they can to monitor the heart situation of anyone who tests positive:
All COVID-19 positive student-athletes will have to undergo comprehensive cardiac testing to include labs and biomarkers, ECG, Echocardiogram and a Cardiac MRI. Following cardiac evaluation, student-athletes must receive clearance from a cardiologist designated by the university for the primary purpose of cardiac clearance for COVID-19 positive student-athletes. The earliest a student-athlete can return to game competition is 21 days following a COVID-19 positive diagnosis.
In addition to the medical protocols approved, the 14 Big Ten institutions will establish a cardiac registry in an effort to examine the effects on COVID-19 positive student-athletes. The registry and associated data will attempt to answer many of the unknowns regarding the cardiac manifestations in COVID-19 positive elite athletes.
Various people have criticized this approach as treating Big Ten football players as "guinea pigs." Many of these criticisms are bad faith idiocy, like the viral tweet guy that said this had "Tuskegee vibes" because this was going to "more-or-less intentionally infect" players, which is completely untrue.
It's still worth addressing: the Big Ten looks like it's set to hold out anyone with abnormal testing. It is explicitly promising to provide cardiac MRIs that Ohio State doctors caught asymptomatic cases of covid-induced myocarditis with:
Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging has the potential to identify a high-risk cohort for adverse outcomes and may, importantly, risk stratify athletes for safe participation because CMR mapping techniques have a high negative predictive value to rule out myocarditis.4
Coronavirus is an unpredictable disease that has widely varying effects on people. It does seem to damage heart function in some cases. What it is exceedingly unlikely to do is damage heart function undetectably.
The Big Ten's approach clears the ethical bar because it is focused on the safety of athletes first and also endeavors to be useful to the medical community, not the other way around.
Did we prioritize football over schools?
No. Football has barely been played. We prioritized bars and restaurants over schools. We prioritized political allegiances over science and therefore schools. We prioritized opening college campuses over K-12. To date, football has had an infinitesimal effect on the state of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, because football has barely been played.
September 19th, 2020 at 12:48 PM ^
I think if the bars were closed, college kids would still have big house parties which will be a greater danger for the spread of COVID (they probably do both party at bars and at home). Such is life, you can't keep young adults from socializing in a free country.
September 19th, 2020 at 1:04 PM ^
Really? A bunch of kids were expelled without tuition reimbursement at a Boston school (Northeastern I think) for doing just that!
If you're positive you're right inks, you should offer your legal services to them!
September 19th, 2020 at 1:33 PM ^
Did you see the video of the FSU coeds throwing down last weekend? That was no bar
September 19th, 2020 at 4:10 PM ^
The fact that they went out and partied despite knowing that they could be expelled actually proves the point.
September 19th, 2020 at 9:46 PM ^
I live in Boston (sorta, as is documented on this site (Salem, but was Fenway about 3 years ago, roughly 0.25 miles away from Northeastern (correct)).
Those who were expelled are fighting it, so that will be interesting from a legal standpoint (not a lawyer). Also they stayed at a Back Bay Marriot that runs $350+ a night at a min, so I have put them in the "too much money to care" category rather than the "too young to care" category.
Maybe I'm just cheap (doesn't track because I lived in Fenway (backdoor brag), but it takes a certain kind of college student to drop that kind of money (non-booze) on a party.
September 19th, 2020 at 10:00 PM ^
I believe that Northeastern Univ. was renting Marriott rooms as temp housing, not the students having a "prom party" or "off-campus apartment".
September 19th, 2020 at 3:00 PM ^
I think Brian's argument about the bars isn't so much to do with college students but instead the wider population. Bars have been shown to be a hub for community spread, and there is no good reason for society to be paying the costs associated with them reopening instead of simply paying them to stay closed.
September 21st, 2020 at 4:12 PM ^
Correct. Some parts of the country chose to open bars and movie theaters and indoor dining in May/June and that decision probably cost having K-12 kids in person vs distanced learning in a lot of those places.
I live in Los Angeles and that was exactly what happened here. They opened all that stuff, cases spiked, they had to shut it back down anyway and that likely is what cost kids in person instruction.
College kids were going to do what college kids do on campus.
September 19th, 2020 at 12:49 PM ^
Good point. And good point. And good point. Etc. Etc. Etc.
College football gets too much shallow attention. But that also means it gets too much shallow criticism.
Go Blue. Go MGoBlog.
September 19th, 2020 at 4:17 PM ^
You know... I am still more leery than Brian about reinstating the season, but this:
"college football gets too much shallow attention. But that also means it gets too much shallow criticism"
is an excellent point and frames the discussion quite accurately.
September 19th, 2020 at 9:44 PM ^
Excellent "wordsmithing". This is great!
September 19th, 2020 at 12:58 PM ^
Re myocarditis, have you heard about E Rodriguez, the Red Sox pitcher who may never play again.
September 19th, 2020 at 2:23 PM ^
And Yoan Moncada, who is playing:
"Definitely my body hasn’t felt the same after the virus," he said Thursday through team interpreter Billy Russo. "I feel a lack of energy, strength, it’s just a weird feeling. It’s different.
"When I got to Chicago, before I tested positive, I was feeling strong and with energy. Now, it’s like a daily battle to try to find that strength, that energy to go through the day."
I think it's pretty stupid to not play in the spring, but they were pinned into a corner that was either fall football or no football.
September 19th, 2020 at 5:15 PM ^
Should public policy be driven by individual case histories?
Myocarditis has been observed since the 17th century. It’s well known to us, can be caused by a variety of factors, and for most people it resolves itself in a matter of time. A minority of cases are less lucky and require medical intervention, though they usually recover. It’s pretty far down the list of causes of death.
This was simply the fig leaf that the Big Ten used to cancel the season, just as rapid testing is the fig leaf to restart the season. In reality both decisions look like PR moves. The league simply misjudged the public attitude last month, thinking that cancelling competition was a popular position. It was not. They should have noticed that the sports world almost without exception was resuming play, including the league where the commissioner’s own son was playing. At least they managed to retreat from that position before it was too late.
September 20th, 2020 at 9:38 AM ^
Not to mention that the testing done for myocarditis has shown been to be way too sensitive, in other words showing false positives that particularly apply to high end athletes. Marathon runners generate conditions that show myocarditis.
"The accumulating data also confirmed that the sicker patients are, the more likely myocardial injury coexists. While some cardiologists inexplicably take this to mean that "acute myocardial injury is commonly observed in COVID-19 and is prognostic for worse outcomes," the data are horribly confounded by indication bias. Essentially, the patients most often tested for cardiac injury are those who are very sick with COVID-19. This is suggestive of correlation, not causation.Of note no studies to date have been able to establish a direct mechanism of cardiac cell injury by the virus. There are a number of case reports and anecdotes that have received widespread coverage, but the published reports don't stand up to closer scrutiny."
September 20th, 2020 at 6:36 PM ^
Brah your "too sensitive" of a test sentence is the dumbest medical take I've seen on this blog. Shows a complete misunderstanding of sensitivity, specificity, positive/negative predictive value or even basic stats. Leave it to the experts bud
September 21st, 2020 at 12:22 PM ^
It's sad that you are being downvoted because you quoted scientific studies.
Follow the science ... unless it doesn't fit your narrative :-(
September 19th, 2020 at 1:15 PM ^
Agree that the Big10 has set a medical standard with a high bar for how to play football. Players wont be getting COVID from playing football, rather they will only be getting it from outside activities. So, there is theoretically no increase in myocarditis risk from football while the additional heart screening seems both conservative and appropriate. This kind of testing is an example of how the rest of the school and the country can get back to work as well, rather than the ridiculous “less testing” approach advocated by POTUS.
However, with daily testing football is taking up far too much of the testing capacity. You cannot just use the percentage of players as compared to the total student population, you have to factor in the very high testing rate and compare it to how often, eg once per week, you might want to test the entire student body. It starts to add up fast.
Also, the high medical standards are great as long as we play other Big10 teams but that all falls apart as soon as you get into a playoff or bowl game.
September 21st, 2020 at 4:28 PM ^
Why do you think that testing capacity would go to anyone else if it wasn't going to football though?
It's not going elsewhere because we don't care enough to demand it and pay for it. Has nothing to do with capacity constraints (that wouldn't be quickly resolved if we wanted to pay for it).
September 19th, 2020 at 1:21 PM ^
I just wonder how we’re all going to feel when a high profile player gets COVID, gets an MRI, has signs of myocarditis, and then has to sit for 3-6 months and hope it resolves.
Imagine it happens to one of Michigan’s best players or to someone like Fields. What would that do to their draft stock? Would probably be far worse than the Mo Hurst situation.
I’m not saying it’s a reason not to play, but it’s going to be a big deal when/if it happens.
September 19th, 2020 at 11:07 PM ^
Why is this more reprehensible than any athlete risking life and limb any given weekend? We have known CTE has devastating long lasting effects for years now and very few are petitioning to shut down football because of it.
If we have quick testing in place with reasonable measures to protect those they come in contact with, why should it be any different?
There have been numerous big name athletes to get it and it’s been forgotten in days. Tom Hanks had it! Remember that?! Probably not until I reminded you.
September 19th, 2020 at 11:56 PM ^
You do realize people ignored the dangers of CTE for decades and only started to pay attention when a bunch of former players started showing awful effects, including death and mental illness, as a result? I don't get the argument that because we ignored an inherent danger of a sport until hundreds of people died unncessarily (and since have been making strides in treatment, early detection, and improved equipment to mitigate said risk), we should do the same here because we don't know the long term risk. That's the whole point of preemptive measures.
Anyway, we live in a world where over 200k people have died from COVID-19, including younger people, and yet we're still seemingly arguing about the danger it poses.
September 20th, 2020 at 10:41 AM ^
I know. Instead of arguing we should accept the facts that the risks from Covid to people under 50 are very low, which is confirmed in all the data that exists. And that the fact that some younger people have died does nothing whatsoever to change that statistical fact. If we accepted that fact and proceeded rationally, we would be arguing about how to best protect the truly vulnerable, supporting them financially, and taking public measures to do so. Instead we argue about how to protest the athletes who have the same risk from Covid as they do flu, another fact. The arguments should be about how to best protect the truly vulnerable from the athletes and students, by appropriate social distancing, financial support if they can't work, and other public health and welfare measures.
September 20th, 2020 at 11:18 AM ^
Here is an informative interview with two Harvard epidemiologists in Jacobin, which in case people don't know, is a progressive outlet with the furthest possible orientation away from Trump. They argue the precise opposite of the consensus that Brian represented, they state there is no medical reason whatsoever to keep schools and colleges remote. At risk teachers and staff should work remotely they argue, not students.
If the lockdown in our communities is lifted responsibly, such that schools, colleges, stores, restaurants, museums, parks, beaches, and most other places where people congregate reopen, while the elderly and others at risk of severe disease and death are protected, infection rates will go up, but this will happen predominantly among younger, healthier people.
With this approach, life for most can go on somewhat normally, people who have been especially harmed by COVID-19 directly and by the lockdown — including Black and Latinx urban workers and other exploited and marginalized groups — can rebuild their lives and livelihoods, and herd immunity will be reached more quickly than under lockdown, while minimizing the number of cases of severe COVID-19 disease and death.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/covid-19-pandemic-economy-us-response-inequality
September 20th, 2020 at 10:40 PM ^
I won't get into the many reasons why Jacobin magazine is, in fact, not a particularly reliable or objective news source, but even taking them at face value that article fails to be internally consistent. It argues that because we have relatively low death rates for people below 50, we should assume that older individuals are the most likely to be susceptible to deadly consequences and limit their exposure within society while loosening restrictions on others. But only a couple paragraphs earlier they note the following
I think I have been most surprised by the varied course COVID-19 can take and particularly some of the consequences that have shown up in some patients only later, like blood clots and long-lasting effects resembling myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). There is still a lot that is unknown about this virus and the disease it causes, and we need to acknowledge this.
So in fact we don't know the long-term impact of the disease on those who contract it; as noted there are longer-lasting impacts that perhaps we don't see in older victims because they die. Treating the outcome of an infection as binary dead/not dead is incorrect, and yet that's largely the calculus applied throughout the article. And that doesn't even acknowledge that beyond age health risks such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity also increase chances of negative outcomes from an infection, and large swaths of Americans of varying ages have 1 or more of those conditions.
They later on note that while at least one vaccine will likely be available in the coming months, we won't know its overall effectiveness. And that's true - no argument there. Most early vaccines provide some level of protection against, at best, 30% of the possible disease strains. With multiple vaccines targeting different strains maybe we nudge that up to over 50%, but then maybe you don't want to expose people to a cocktail of different vaccines all at one time. But they then argue that the idea of "flattening the curve" doesn't make long-term sense, that trying to limit people's exposure to a contagious respiratory infection only stalls the onset of herd immunity.
But I have been struck by how this emphasis on keeping the numbers down at all costs has not evolved with time. There is a kind of simplistic goal of keeping people from getting infected, period. Now this may seem like a worthy goal, but with a highly contagious respiratory virus to which most of the world’s population is probably still not immune, people are going to get infected. The virus will spread, quickly or less so, until herd immunity is reached.
Well, a key point of a vaccine is to create that herd immunity in a much more controlled manner than simple "natural" infections. I mean, I assume that the two Harvard-trained biologists know more about the science of disease than I do, but the premise than unchecked communal infections are better at reaching herd immunity than controlled medical exposure feels flimsy to me. They sort of wave their hands at this dichotomy and argue the the politicization of the term "herd immunity" is at issue, that it will inevitably happen and we are overreacting by not allowing it to occur based on natural exposure. I think that grossly mischaracterizes the reservations people had about the "LSU model" of herd immunity, and regardless would likely lead to hundreds of thousands of more deaths in the country in all likelihood.
I could go on, but you get my point. This is an article written with the conclusion in mind and then they worked backwards. They point out numerous times that this disease and the lockdowns adversely affected Black and Latinx workers, who are more likely to be in service and other industries that require in-person work. And that's absolutely true. Of course, those groups are at a higher risk of having complications from an infection, so "herd immunity" via normal exposure isn't optimal for them. But they sort of skip over that part, likely because it hurts their overall message.
This is obviously a topic that has been discussed for months, with no clear answers out there. But I'm getting tired of people waving their hands at it all and acting like it's inevitable and then repurposing the 200k dead to justify some other issue they have with society.
September 21st, 2020 at 11:23 AM ^
I give no weight to the source, I do give weight to two highly competent experts who are interviewed, and whose own words are 98% of the article. Obviously you are free to disagree with two expert's conclusions, (though they also square with identical conclusions from Sunetra Gupta at Oxford) one of the world's leading epidemiologists, so let's make it three) and undoubtedly we can find other experts advocating other methods--that's what science should be. I just find it interesting because it proves once again, that (and I'm including myself here) far from "listen to the experts," which we hear everywhere as an admonition, what we have with you here and almost everyone else is rather "listen to the experts that I agree with."
September 21st, 2020 at 4:51 PM ^
At the most general level I agree; you shouldn't just listen to experts you agree with. But that doesn't mean you should take everything stated by an expert as equally valid. For example, Sunetra Gupta published a paper back in March proposing that the majority of populations in places like Italy and the UK had already been exposed to COVID-19 by the time that the initial surges in deaths hit; in effect, shutting down was protecting a small minority of susceptible people while needlessly hurting the majority of the population that had already been exposed and, seemingly, recovered. Of course, that hasn't really born out, and she seems to have walked those claims back a bit by acknowledging her model made some rough assumptions.
Which again, is fine - it's a model of a novel virus; you are going to get it wrong more times than you get it right. But we have a pretty significant and consistent stream of data that this virus has a long tail effect on those infected; that myocarditis occurs in a decent chunk of people who get infected with COVID-19, that Black and Latinx populations (even controlling for age) have higher incidence of more severe cases from the disease, etc. And most of the points in this article acknowledged that, only the counter-argument was that it financially hurt these under-served populations more to not work. Which is a policy discussion we can have, but it isn't a medical one (which is their stated specialties).
And I guess I'm just getting tired of the "we should limit exposure to the most susceptible in the population" pablum when, for example, the 7 people who died as a result of the Maine wedding super-spreader event a couple weeks ago didn't attend the wedding. They did "the best they could" and they're still dead, and so when I see experts talking about how if we just erected these barriers we'd be better off I get cranky.
September 21st, 2020 at 9:54 PM ^
"And I guess I'm just getting tired of the "we should limit exposure to the most susceptible in the population" pablum ..."
Understood, perfectly. What 1987 and others still don't understand is that a binary sort of the population on this issue is ridiculous. You have at least three types of risk that are continuous:
- Age
- Dose
- Co-morbidities
There are several sub-types for the last one. For example, there are degrees of hypertension.
Plenty of chunky eighty-somethings have probably walked away from this without a scratch. Some young and healthy healthcare workers (secondary to large doses, mostly) have been floored.
September 22nd, 2020 at 9:00 AM ^
I don't understand your point. Is it that because age and co-morbidities are too widely dispersed so that you can't just protect the most vulnerable? Because if that's the argument it simply isn't borne out by mortality data. The mortality data is quite clear, that age, well beyond anything else, is the #1 factor. Others are important yes, but when you have up half of deaths from nursing homes and more on top of that from care homes, the average age of death almost 80, deaths under 50 comparable to flu and pneumonia deaths, it's very clear where we can protect the vulnerable. And the fact that some younger people have died or had long term impacts does not change those facts.
September 21st, 2020 at 7:04 AM ^
We live in a world where nearly a million people have died from COVID-19--but, yes, technically "over 200k."
September 21st, 2020 at 4:31 PM ^
Sorry, meant to say in the US.
September 20th, 2020 at 9:31 AM ^
I'm not taking a stand on whether we should have a season or not. My point is that it seems pretty disingenuous to try and argue a point when you're not the one taking the risk. Or to try and minimize the risk by citing people who had it and are now fine. We don't know if Tom Hanks had lingering symptoms or effects. We don't know what a Covid football season will yield because we haven't had one yet. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I know that it will be disastrous because I'm not a medical professional, and my guess is neither are you. None of us know for sure what will happen.
September 21st, 2020 at 5:13 PM ^
It's also absurd to argue that people shouldn't be allowed to have a choice to play because one guy has to sit out this season for the Red Sox for an ailment that isn't unique to this virus and which somewhat frequently affects athletes.
So yeah, this whole thread of anecdotal evidence is terrible.
We don't know for sure whats going to happen with football but sports have been back for months now, starting with European soccer. There are some indications of how bad (or not bad) the heart issues may be. They're not totally flying blind.
September 19th, 2020 at 1:25 PM ^
As a college football fan, you come to accept hypocrisy is part of the deal (e.g., "student" athlete). It can be hard at times to hold your nose to avoid the stench while trying to enjoy it, but the game and the players typically get you through.
Howver, this COVID stuff is something else. While Clemson offering Rashan Gary $300k when Michigan has to get/keep him w/o doing that is unfair, it's not dangerous. Yet now we have a dozen-plus schools either a) purposefully or b) negligently having mass outbreaks, and the main concern of many college football types is, "Will they be back in time for the rivalry game?"
When Harbaugh wrote his great letter before the postponement, he rightfully focused on the fact that his program would, and had, kept his players safe, and thus the larger community safe; playing football wouldn't contribute meaningfully to the spread.
Yet based on the reaction to Texas Tech, LSU, etc, that was a waste of time; few care. Andy Staples tried to argue that "how could you know?" if the fact 60% of the team had COVID was from football. Well, Texas Tech's dashboard showed 3% of the student population has tested positive, so unless he is thinking 25,000 Tech students are asymptomatic and untested, football is the reason football players got COVID. And worse than that, as Brian pointed out, there has been little to no contact tracing, so most importantly how many people in the community who aren't 18-24 fit athletes got it? Who knows? Who in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, etc cares?
I'll watch Michigan when they start play in a month bc this B1G plan seems a lot safer and, to be frank, it's a (mostly) enjoyable habit that's hard to break. But I'm punting on the nonconf schedule. The smell is just too much.
September 19th, 2020 at 1:53 PM ^
The football team vs. the general student body argument is the most relevant one.
It's a virus. You avoid people, keep your hands clean, and wear a mask until a vaccine arrives. That's just common sense. But college students aren't especially prone to employing common sense.
So what is most striking is that once developments like the daily antigen testing occur and are immediately put to good use, people get pissy about said use. I have no qualms about the decision to start the season. I have serious qualms about the other things not being done on a societal scale.
September 21st, 2020 at 11:23 AM ^
But, you vaccinate your daughter with a stage 1 trial vaccine after 76 tests?
September 19th, 2020 at 2:05 PM ^
The premise that football players getting frequent testing does not decrease the opportunity for others to obtain tests is simply NOT true, PERIOD. This fallacy needs to end now.
I am an MD. I work in an office with 12 MDs and another dozen mid-level providers. We are trying to buy an Abbot Now testing machine that provides rapid test results for Covid, influenza and strep. We cannot obtain a machine for at least 6 weeks likely longer, well after the start of the Big Ten season, because of the high demand for the machine. So, the testing of football players does affect the ability of laymen to get tested because these football teams are able to obtain the testing machines, that we, as medical professionals caring for patients, cannot.
Also, have you or a family member attempted to get a cardiologist appointment? It generally takes weeks for non-emergent appointments. So now you add football players who test positive for Covid jumping the line.
I love football, especially Michigan football, but save the BS. Having college football does detrimentally affect the ability of society as a whole to obtain medical care.
September 19th, 2020 at 3:03 PM ^
Yeah I’m confused by Brian’s point. Tests are a limited resource. If football players are being tested daily then that means they are using that resource, which means there is less to go around. We could debate how limited of a resource testing is, but it’s certainly not unlimited to the point where students in k-12 are being tested daily.
September 19th, 2020 at 3:46 PM ^
Great information. But the big question is how much of a detrimental effect does college football have on the overall demand/supply of testing resources. One could argue that the need for testing resources nationwide is so huge, college football's piece of that demand is pretty tiny. That still may not justify college football "cutting the line" in the big picture. But the shortage of equipment would likely still be a big problem college football or not.
September 19th, 2020 at 4:03 PM ^
But you could apply this argument to any request then. Also, every one of these production estimations aren't immediate; Abbott isn't going to drop 50M tests for immediate use in one fell swoop. It's a continuous production stream, and if college football gets to jump ahead then the people who don't get tests (like schools, hospitals, etc.) will have to wait longer, further exposing their users to longer tests and more opportunities for COVID-19 to spread. If, for example, 200k of Abbott's first batch of 2M tests get picked up by the Big 10 (which wouldn't be a crazy number), then that's 10% of your available tests off the market. That's significant.
September 19th, 2020 at 3:57 PM ^
Yeah, I have no idea why people keep acting like this clearly-finite resource being hoovered up by college football teams isn't going to hurt others. I mean, we just spent half a year realizing that this country doesn't have nearly enough PPE, test facilities, lab space, respirators, etc. to handle a surge in need.
September 19th, 2020 at 8:34 PM ^
You're right, college football does effect COVD, but it is a second or third order effect and hard for most people to see. Politically (not left or right) for the the B1G people to keep there jobs there would have to be pronounced first order effects in the SEC, ACC, etc. So far the optics are that players are getting it and are mostly fine. Powerful people and celebrities are always going to get to cut in line when it comes to resources. I'm glad there is a season and I hope the B1G can do it as safely as possible. It's hard for me to mentally quantify the second and third order negative effect over my enjoyment of football. Yes people will die, but it is going to be really hard to draw a direct correlation to football and it seems like it would be in a very small number of cases. The world is on fire and it sucks.
September 20th, 2020 at 12:40 AM ^
Yeah, a small demand surge still matters a great deal if the resource is scarce enough. Brian can deny it all he wants, but we are implicitly saying that it is more important to have college football than to have more widespread access to testing resources. This may not be bad or shocking (we implicitly say sports are more important than more than a great many things even before COVID-19), but it's true.
September 19th, 2020 at 2:11 PM ^
The protocols seem reasonable to me. If we get an effective vaccine (something like 70%+) then this will be a temporary situation.
However, I have my doubts about the vaccine, and the B1G’s protocols might be one way we learn to live with the virus. We may have to accept that reality eventually.
September 19th, 2020 at 2:27 PM ^
I'm confident one of the nine vaccines they're testing around the world will work. There's been scarce reports of COVID re-infection, so shouldn't be any issues with it not lasting either.
September 21st, 2020 at 1:56 PM ^
I'm confident one of the nine vaccines they're testing around the world will work.
Me too. However, I'm not confident our current government will give us access to the most effective of them if they aren't produced by our hand-picked companies and/or aren't ready on the president's currently-dreaming accelerated time-table. Note Alex Azar's assumption of full control of the FDA and its rule-making abilities re: medicines.
September 19th, 2020 at 2:37 PM ^
Brian, who seems to be viewed as a suspicious bearded radical socialist by some on this board, is OK with the Big Ten playing football. That is going to confuse some on this board.
September 19th, 2020 at 2:52 PM ^
The only thing I don’t agree with is calling decisions right or wrong at this juncture. I don’t think we know that yet, and it’s possible we never will.
The earliest we could make that call would be after the season IMO.
September 19th, 2020 at 3:16 PM ^
agree and disagree.
agree that time will tell - it always does.
but disagree in that the question is not whether it was the right decision in the end (when all facts are known), but was it the right decision at the time. I think we generally are bad at assessing this kind of nuance.
September 19th, 2020 at 3:33 PM ^
Especially when Brian previously argued this was a wicked problem and even a season with no deaths doesn’t prove anyone right. This is what everyone who claims victory for Sweden or Florida or whatever doesn’t understand.
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