MGoPodcast 12.19: Stops
1 hour and 12 minutes
The Sponsors
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1. The Shutdown
starts at 1:00
Two weeks(?) without Michigan athletics because somebody wasn’t quarantined after coming home from the U.K. We discuss why it was necessary to shut down, how it went down, and how it might play out. We’re just baffled that this failure was allowed to happen.
The rest of the writeup and the player after The Jump]
2. The Last Game
starts at 18:50
Ugly game wasn’t that ugly unless you’re talking about Purdue’s shooting stats, which were a combination of Dickinson dominating Williams and the Boilers not having a Sasha Stefanovich to convert threes. It’s right that they went 2/18 because look how many of those were from terrible shooters. Seth likes that you can put Austin Davis out there against virtually anybody and score one for one, which eats up important minutes when you’re up by 11.
3. WBB and Hockey
starts at 43:48
Naz goes off for 50, brings Michigan back from down 16 but they lose because they’re out a Brown and the other can’t hit her threes. Nobody scored past the top four. Hockey looks good on NBC, came out on fire, can’t get a call.
4. Hot Takes and Warinner React
starts at 59:22
Seth is happy to have DeBord back. Think there’s some other shoe that dropped because no way you get rid of a guy like Ed Warinner on purpose. Offensive line coach and strength coach are coordinator-level positions.
MUSIC:
- “Wait"—M83
- “Sonny’s Lament”—Orgone
- “Selfish Dreas”—The Rural Alberta Advantage
- “Across 110th Street”
THE USUAL LINKS:
I want to know his hat size so bad.
January 24th, 2021 at 5:38 PM ^
Constant panic and fear. It has to stop. I worry the damage is already irreversible in many places in this country and around the globe. The solution is and has been pretty clear. Find ways to protect the vulnerable, specifically the elderly. Then get us back to normal life.
las Vegas schools have realized how damaging this has been on our children and are returning their kids to school.
January 24th, 2021 at 5:43 PM ^
How many deaths would have to occur for you to change your mind? Since 400,000 obviously isn’t enough, what would be? 1 million? 10 million?
January 24th, 2021 at 5:48 PM ^
I think you're missing the point of that message: protect the vulnerable and keep as much normalcy for rest as possible. Here's the data:
January 24th, 2021 at 5:50 PM ^
^ This is exactly what I’m saying.
Use the scientific data in front of our faces.
January 24th, 2021 at 5:51 PM ^
Well if the message is “find a way to do something that we haven’t been able to do for a year without mass death,” it’s not a very persuasive message.
January 24th, 2021 at 6:02 PM ^
Deaths are not the only thing. I teach, I have students and parents who have had it. It is debilitating even though it didn't kill them.
January 24th, 2021 at 8:05 PM ^
That's all fine and good but we've known this mortality rates for going on a year and 4k people died a couple of days last week. We haven't figured out to any meaningful degree how to protect the vulnerable amongst us and the various attempts by states to return to "normalcy" without robust masking and social distancing measures haven't worked.
Anyway, this is an endless argument and nobody is changing anyone's minds at this point. But please stop acting like this is some easy solution that most of the world is simply unable to comprehend.
January 24th, 2021 at 11:07 PM ^
“Protect the vulnerable and keep the rest as normal as possible”
What do you think has been going on for the last few months? Are living somewhere where people have no regard for the vulnerable?
It seems to me like pretty much everyone who isn’t an asshole has been trying to protect the vulnerable by social distancing and wearing masks. And most policies are aimed at making things as normal as possible while also acknowledging the severity of the situation. You can go to the store, you can go to a restaurant or bar. The NFL is allowing fans. There is plenty of things going on that are trying to keep everything normal.
In all honesty, you sound brain washed. You seem to be parroting some phrases that I see thrown around constantly to be combative, without ever stopping to ask yourself if maybe that’s exactly what everyone is doing. Protect the vulnerable and try to maintain some normalcy. Pretty much what every non moron has been doing for the last 10 months. What have you been doing?
January 24th, 2021 at 11:38 PM ^
None of this means anything now that there’s a new strain our inbred cousins across the pond have gifted us that is as dangerous to children as anyone else.
January 25th, 2021 at 12:21 PM ^
Yes because we all know that people of different age groups never interact with each other and spread among the general population will most certainly not reach vulnerable populations.
January 24th, 2021 at 5:49 PM ^
The disease is overwhelmingly more lethal to the older population. 65 and older account for 300,000 of COVID deaths. Like I said. Protect the older population. We should also find ways to protect those with comorbidities. Do that and the death rate is near zero.
January 24th, 2021 at 5:53 PM ^
How? What policy will protect the elderly while simultaneously not restricting the activities of younger demographics? People have been trying to figure that out for a long time.
January 24th, 2021 at 6:07 PM ^
It inherently relies on behavior. If people have the information and they choose not to protect themselves, there is no policy that will do it. With online services now, We have infrastructure in place to cater to the needs of the older population without exposing them to it.
January 24th, 2021 at 7:15 PM ^
Carolina blue:
Your take is overconfident and crass. Death is emphatically NOT the only public health crisis here.
The sequellae like lung scarring, blood clot outcomes (heart attack, stroke, pulmonary embolism, limb amputation) and “brain fog” (associated with an emerging post-viral autoimmune disorder that resembles myalgic encephalitis/CFS) are serious long-term disabilities.
And many may be truly irreversible. Further, these are largely disorders of the previously young and healthy.
/your friendly neighborhood MGo-medical-doctor-and-biochemist
January 25th, 2021 at 10:40 AM ^
"If people have the information and they choose not to protect themselves, there is no policy that will do it."
I sure hope you're not implying that mask-wearing and social distancing are intended to help people "protect themselves". Because someone that ignorant must be willfully ignorant.
January 24th, 2021 at 8:09 PM ^
I feel like I'm repeating myself.
January 24th, 2021 at 8:09 PM ^
Yeah, at this point I assume people claiming "all you have to do is stop infecting older people and let everyone go back to their lives" were simply coming out of a near year-long coma
January 24th, 2021 at 10:21 PM ^
I’m tremendously curious about people who have that approach. They seem to have it all figured out, but I’m left wondering, OK, where are you shipping all the geezers to protect them so everyone else can live their jaunty lives? Antarctica? Mars? The logistics seem more difficult than those making the argument might be aware of.
January 25th, 2021 at 12:22 PM ^
If you include obesity and diabetes in the comorbidity grouping over 50% of the US has a comorbidity. Good luck protecting them without society wide orders!
January 24th, 2021 at 6:28 PM ^
How many Died with vs because?
January 24th, 2021 at 8:40 PM ^
How many of those that died "with" (as you say) would have died without?
January 24th, 2021 at 8:48 PM ^
All of them.
January 24th, 2021 at 9:18 PM ^
My neighbor died a week ago with covid. He had a gangrenous gall bladder. He was in and out of the hospital for much of the last year. I wonder if his passing will be recorded as a covid-related death. I also wonder if the doctors would have been able to accurately diagnose his problem and cure him if they weren’t so stressed out and overwhelmed by covid cases.
I drove his wife to the hospital the last time she saw him alive, through a window.
January 25th, 2021 at 1:40 PM ^
Do you think all of our student athletes and staff will choose to stay locked in a room all alone for 2 weeks? Absolutely not. What is the point of stopping sports when the athletes/staff will continue going out, being with families, working out, likely partying, etc.
Our BBall program has zero illness and still got shut down. There is no science proving they will be more or less likely to get covid playing organized sports compared to going out and hanging out with friends.
This is foolish over reaction. What if the variant is still in the county in 2 weeks, because it likely will be. Do we stay shut down another 2 weeks despite having no positives? And possibly another 2 weeks after that? Not playing basketball is NOT saving lives when the same players/staff will continue to have daily lives as they should.
This sports shut down is a joke.
January 25th, 2021 at 6:07 PM ^
Precisely. This two week moratorium will end and nothing will be any different than before. The athletes have not been quarantined as far as any news report I have seen. It will still be spreading in 2 weeks. So how is this changing anything? Why don't they do the proper thing, contact tracing on the infected person, quarantine them for 4 days and then run tests on all those people and let everyone else be. Rapid antigen test costs less then $30. Heck, the could test every basketball player/coach every single day for maybe $500/day cost . . . about what Juwan is paid every hour of work. Athlete or not, that is how it works. How is this infected person somehow been in contact with every athlete at UM but not any of the general student population? The logic of shutting down sports makes no sense. Shut down the entire school or shut down nothing. And if you shut it down, you must quarantine, the virus doesn't spread only while playing sports.
January 24th, 2021 at 6:24 PM ^
The answer is to get people vaccinated. Then we can get back to normal life hopefully by sometime this fall. Those that who choose not to vaccinate, well good luck to them.
I have 2 kids in virtual school. They are doing fine. Yes, it sucks, but you just do the best you can.
January 24th, 2021 at 7:12 PM ^
It's been close to a year and people are still suggesting binary sorts. Egad.
There isn't a well-defined "vulnerable" population.
At one end, there are probably many thousands of hypertensive 80-somethings who've walked away from this without a scratch. They got low doses of the virus and survived.
At the other end, try this on for size: A healthy 50-something friend of mine just had a (likely, given the timing) COVID-related vascular incident and lost 80+% of his vision in his right eye. Was he more "vulnerable" than all the fortunate 80-somethings?
January 25th, 2021 at 6:48 AM ^
There is no clear answer. Business week just ran a article last week. California is the largest state with the toughest restrictions, Texas the largest state with the most laid back restrictions. They both have the same amount of deaths and unemployment is nearly identical.
January 24th, 2021 at 7:46 PM ^
Let's do the math. The figures from this summer (that I have handy) were 349 deaths per million for non-elderly (<65) individuals without underlying diseases. About 54 (earlier typo corrected) million Americans are 65+. If you throw them all behind a lock and key, you still have, say, 320,000,000 people out and about. That's 111,680 deaths. That's a little more than this many:
Oh, and of course we're going to have to make sure everyone gets it, or we can't let the 65+ crowd out every again. But if we're all getting sick at once, we're not actually getting the level of hospital treatment that has kept our numbers so low. Only about 1/25 of us will even see a doctor. We'd be looking at more like 5 times the death rate at least. Maybe 20 times. So let's conservatively say we're at 1 million deaths.
Also, and I'm not sure you've thought about this, but if you replicate a disease that many times you're going to get variants, as we have already. Some of those variants will be immune to the vaccine and antibodies of the regular virus. So then we're looking at another pandemic, or three. And years to get out of it. I trust you can imagine that without scrolling through that many Michigan Stadiums?
Finally, there are a lot of things short of death that COVID leaves us with. I had a lung disease three years ago that had similar symptoms to COVID (we actually never did find out what it was). I passed out in the shower (1/1 wives polled HATE it when you do that) and spent 12 days in the hospital and another 16 months with a pulmonologist and that infernal blowing the ball machine to get my breathing back. I now have a cardiologist and all sorts of extra risk factors. COVID has been associated with all of this shit. So let's multiply all of the above by 10 and then consider what having a population with that much Long Covid would do to our healthcare system.
Meanwhile we're getting nothing out of a substantial population of elderly people going insane while their children and grandchildren are out here dying.
So let's put away your plan to literally do nothing and let the disease take us.
My wife is a child psychologist. I've got kids, and as of two weeks ago the elder is in in-person learning half a day, and I've been part of the school district zoom meetings to shape the curricula because I wanted to make sure they had some kind of in-person interactions (which means more work for us parents in the educating department) during the in-person time. I fully recognize how important it is for kids to be interacting with each other at that age, and we and our schools and other families have been going to extraordinary lengths to make that happen safely. Before it was possible, we had a small closed-circle group of kids from school who could play together. This kind of planning has been going on piecemeal, everybody inventing their own wheel, since last March. I'm telling you there is no binary argument going on here: We all care about the economy and we all care about controlling the disease, and we're all inventing ways to get as much as we can of both, knowing we can't fully have either until we solve the pandemic.
I would also ask you please stop calling everyone else cowards for it. It's hard enough trying to get through this without being told our efforts are from fear. I consider standing and fighting a disease instead of cowering before it and letting it take whomever it pleases is one of the bravest acts humanity has ever undertaken. Also, it is the path that we, your brothers and countrymen, have chosen. The gameplan is set, we've practiced it, and we're all waiting for you on the bus. Join the team.
January 24th, 2021 at 8:49 PM ^
This needs to be permanently stickied somewhere ??????
January 24th, 2021 at 9:19 PM ^
Agreed. One of the best comments ever posted here.
January 24th, 2021 at 9:12 PM ^
Thanks. Great win versus Purdue! Really sorry to see MBB (and women's and hockey...) get put on the shelf. One less diversion, one less thing to look forward to for the next couple weeks.
January 24th, 2021 at 10:00 PM ^
I mean, he also cited a poll of wives with a sample size of 1, so I can see why you'd be steaming about him playing fast and loose with statistics.
Perhaps, and hear me out, Seth typed a number in incorrectly.
January 24th, 2021 at 10:14 PM ^
Yeah typo. For a total of 375 million.
EDIT: Thank you for changing your original post.
January 25th, 2021 at 9:09 AM ^
Also, I know the sample size is low, but I still take that poll seriously. I was just sitting there quietly drifting out of this mortal coil, and the woman was yelling at me and whacking at me like I was trying to kill her husband.
January 25th, 2021 at 10:21 PM ^
HEY!!!!
Somebody tell Warde to open back up the athletic departments because Basketballschoolnow will be inconvenienced without his diversion for a couple weeks.
January 24th, 2021 at 9:20 PM ^
This pediatric oncology nurse, my pediatric nurse practitioner wife and, I'm sure, my pediatrician brother approve of this message!!!
January 24th, 2021 at 10:30 PM ^
Fucking thank you Seth
January 25th, 2021 at 7:43 PM ^
Exactly. We are all (or almost all) Michigan fans here. A little solidarity would be nice. Thanks Seth.
January 25th, 2021 at 9:37 AM ^
The problem is people like you. It's very simple.
January 25th, 2021 at 10:34 AM ^
I promise you the damage done from staying in and ordering delivery pales in comparison to the damage done to the doctors nurses and everyone else working in the hospitals working 16 hour days for weeks straight without breaks
January 24th, 2021 at 6:41 PM ^
Do we actually know someone in the AD came home from GB without quarantining? Because that's far from the only way to get that strain, it's all over the place already.
January 25th, 2021 at 8:58 AM ^
Yes we know an athlete came home from the UK with the virus and that's how it got into the AD.
January 24th, 2021 at 6:53 PM ^
Minor quibble from the beginning: Fauci countered Biden administration's insistence that vaccine program they inherited was "starting from scratch."
From his Thursday press conference:
"We're coming in with fresh ideas, but also some ideas that were not bad ideas with the previous administration. You can't say it was absolutely not usable at all," he said.
"It's taking what's going on, but amplifying it in a big way."
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/535327-fauci-we-are-not-starting-from-scratch-on-vaccine-distribution
Don't know if you were specifically talking about just vaccine program, or just the federal government's COVID-19 prevention plan, so open for a clarification. Not aiming to get political, just seeking full accuracy on that point.
January 24th, 2021 at 8:13 PM ^
Yeah, there was some hyperbole there and it's worth clarifying. We're at about a million vaccines a day right now, and that was started by the last administration. But the distribution system is apparently still a bit of a mess, which also falls on the failures of the Trump response.
January 24th, 2021 at 8:26 PM ^
No. Trump can be blamed for the some of the deals he set up with manufacturers, but 90% of the issues with regards to distribution right now are on the manufacturing capacity and local municipalities in how they distribute the vaccine.
One of the many things I hoped for when Trump left is that we’d stop blaming him for everything. I guess I can still hope.
January 24th, 2021 at 9:08 PM ^
But that's part of my point - the lack of a coherent federal distribution system has left it mostly to the states to figure out, with obviously less-than-ideal outcomes. Apparently the stockpile of vaccines held by the federal government weren't coordinated well, leaving states to believe they should expand their criteria for access only to find out there were actually no new supplies available. And distribution to specific groups, such as those in nursing homes, has seen mixed results in large part because their participation in the Federal Pharmacy Partnership has run into a variety of hiccups, some due to private issues (such as insufficiently prepared CVS/Walgreen pharmacies and states having varying expectations for how they distribute the vaccine) but also the federal government's overall disorganization in making sure those services were set up properly beforehand.
Again, I'm not blaming Trump for everything, but a national pandemic absolutely needs a strong federal government component, and if your argument is that federal government under Trump's leadership has been unfairly maligned for their handling of COVID-19, I'm not going to ride that train.
January 24th, 2021 at 10:26 PM ^
If the shoe fits....
January 24th, 2021 at 11:16 PM ^
Can we blame him for the fact that his petulance following the election delayed the transition of power? Things like working with the new administration to pass the plan on and ensure a smooth roll out. Get the teams in place prior to Jan 20.
January 25th, 2021 at 6:03 AM ^
that state and local health departments (and vaccine manufacturers) are left to figure out how best to distribute the vaccine is EXACTLY THE POINT.
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