USC (Pac version) moving to (nearly) all online classes this fall
No announcement yet regarding sports (that I have seen), but this isn't a good sign.
FYI.
Dominoes are falling... I'm ready to watch some football, but my skepticism is mounting.
There is an interesting read on the Roll Tide site involving the question of playing football amid Covid framed around some commentary from Scott Frost (no word on whether his mother chimed in on the matter). Essentially, the question boils down to, if there is no football, how exactly does it benefit the players, or anybody, really? Point being, the players are not going to cease to exist if they are not playing football, they will simply be a lot less structured in their daily schedule and interactions and will likely fall more in line with typical students who are not-going-to-socially-distance elsewhere on campus anyway, or decide not to go to school at all and forego an education to not-socially-distance back in whatever their home town may be.
So, if you decide to cancel the season, why, exactly, would you be doing that? Because football players can't socially distance? They are 18-22 year olds. They are at the height of their social and educational existence. Are classes going to stop? Are parties going to stop? Is sex going to stop? None of this stuff is going to stop, so what exactly does stopping football accomplish?
I've been vocal on a lot of issues involving Covid, but I'm not writing this to stir shit up, I just thought it was an interesting read and brought up some good points.
At this point with the current prevailing narrative, I think it is more likely that there is no live school of any kind with corresponding sports closures than it is full school with football. The article just kind of frames the issue differently and is worth a read.
No link because I have not taken the four minutes required to figure out how to link an article.
That's been my take for a while. If students are going to be living in the dorms, what difference is not playing football going to make?
Practice, travel, interacting with players from another team are all activities that increase the risk of transmission that are from from essential to the functioning of society. Students in dorms can wear masks and can stay socially distanced (they won't but they could). Our goal as a society should be eliminating non-essential risks right now, we know it can be successful if done competently, most of europe did it. But making schools millions of dollars by increasing the health risk of unpaid student athletes isn't anywhere close to essential
The question is will it increase the health risk? To me non-essential is only relevant in the context of increased risk. I don't see how playing football is going to increase the risks for people living in the dorms, going to class, going to parties, hooking up, going to the cafeteria, in my great state (Alabama) having infection parties, and anything else college students are going to be doing. Do you have a reasonable hypothesis for how football will add to those risks that are already going to be incurred?
Of course it increases risk. Every single interaction is an increased risk, literally every single one. Between practice and games you are adding in thousands of interactions in which players will be within 6 feet of other people and not wearing masks and every single one of those interactions is increased risk.
But regardless of the increased risk its also a difference between individual actions and formally sanctioned actions. Kids going to a party is stupid, our leaders shouldn't be basing their public safety policies off what stupid college kids are going to do. Just like states should shut down bars even if people will drink in their house with each other its the wrong decision to have them play games because it increases risk. Its pretty simple.
That was a bunch of words without addressing the actual question. You're asserting it increases risks, I'm saying I don't buy it, you asserting it again except this time saying of course it does, doesn't further the conversation. For example if the risk for an athlete being exposed without playing football is 100%, which when engaging in the activities above it's going to be awfully close, then it's not possible for playing football to increase that risk. Even if it's not 100%, the risk of playing football is negligible when compared with the risk of everyday life for a college student. If I'm wrong, explain how.
Nobody is ever 100% for anything. I'm not sure how to explain it. If every random interaction person has .01% of giving you the virus every interaction is an increase of .01%. Just because living in the dorms increases a players chance of getting the virus by 60%it doesn't mean that playing football increasing the risk by 10% isn't increasing the risk. You seem to assume but because other things might be riskier or already high levels of risk exist it suddenly means everything is on the table. The argument isn't whether the risk is less than being back at school generally, its still increasing the risk.
Do you also think doctors should be eating out drinking in bars because relative to working in the hospital it isn't that much of an increase in risk?
The question is the incremental value vs the incremental risk. If we only had the objective of reducing/eliminating C19 community spread risk all states would still be in lock down. Certainly the players, the schools, and society at large derive value from having a season. Does that overcome the incremental risk? That’s the question. Not “is there incremental risk“. Everyone knows there is, there is disagreement on how significant it is vs the alternative.
That's not a real discussion. The discussion is does it add risk? If yes, is it essential? If the answer to that is no, they shouldn't do it.
If the US had handled the virus appropriately at the beginning and we looked like Germany we could have discussions about trade off. With rampant community spread anything non-essential that adds risk shouldn't be happening, and it especially shouldn't be happening to make millions on the backs of unpaid labor.
What is and isn’t essential, in your opinion? For example, do you disagree with the AAP that school should be in-person? Are the incremental education benefits of in-person vs online instruction for 1st graders “essential”? What about 8th graders?
I don't think that would be increasing the doctors risk in any appreciable way but that would be different to me because that is adding a new population, the people eating there, to the mix in a way football doesn't.
Having a football team also involves coaches, medical and training staff, facilities staff, security, tv and broadcast crews, bus drivers and pilots, equipment managers. Its a long list of people involved in that bubble that isn't just 85 18-22 year olds
Yes but that is a different discussion. We were talking about students and the risk to them. Employees are a different discussion that bring in different variables.
Edit to add: My previous statement was poorly thought out and I would request a redo. I don't think that negates the overall point.
The health risk to students is turning out to be higher than originally thought. But, the reality is it’s still unknown. Then there is the risk of spreading it to high risk groups like older professors and staff or parents. That’s been widely debated.
The reality is that USC is one of the first schools to make a difficult, unpopular, and financially disatrous decision. And given all those negatives the health factors driving that decision need to be given the credit they are due.
Even more respect is due since USC made the announcement before the July 1 deadline that many students face regarding committing to the year and committing to residences (off campus leases). Of course USC has a huge endowment so they can survive the year financially. But I don’t see any other schools putting the students and families first. Rather, other schools seem to be trying to get students to commit to tuition, room, and board, and wait until the train is far out of the station before they face a very likely scenario of having to cancel on campus classes anyway. It’s not hard to predict mathematically that many locations will be much worse off with cases in two months than today.
if USC, UCLA, Arizona State, and Arizona have to cancel football then the pac 12 will have to cancel. Clearly, the south east conference is going to be in a lot of trouble and I just can’t imagine them having a football game.
College students can do a semester online. They can move winter semester to the summer if they have to. After that there’s a much greater chance that things could be back to normal.
It’s the high schools and the grade schools where it’s much more difficult to deliver education across all communities remotely. Parents of younger kids can’t turn into at home teachers and keep a full-time job. Some kids shouldn’t be at home with their parents and are better off being in school and getting fed. Education at that level is a much bigger concern then college education and certainly than college football.
Put the "...coaches, medical and training staff, facilities staff, security, tv and broadcast crews, bus drivers and pilots, equipment managers..." who are elderly or in ill-health, on unemployment or paid leave until an effective vaccine is available. Then, again, we are talking about young, healthy people wanting to live more-or-less normal lives, including their athletic passions.
Going to a bar in a region with community spread is much more dangerous than working at a hospital in that region with adequate PPE and infection control. I worked in the COVID-19 ICUs but I would never (and haven't) gone to restaurants/bars. It was reflected in our health care worker infections, which were much more tied to COVID-19 rates in their home neighborhood than the type of patients that they treated.
We all understand that there are more people involved in running a football program or season than just the 18-22 year old players, right - I get the feeling some people don't understand that.
I was just in Ann Arbor last weekend and took my dogs to a park. I would estimate 50 college age guys and girls laying out getting a tan in an enclosed space with obviously no mask on.
People are eventually (if not already) going to judge their individual risk of getting this only and then go about living their lives with only that thought in mind.
I don't blame a single person for thinking this way especially someone with almost zero risk. That will eventually become the norm again just a matter of time. Trying to control the actions of people has always been unrealistic. Sooner we realize this the better. Give people the data and let them decide for themselves just like everything else in life.
If you are laying out, aren’t you outside? By definition a non-enclosed space.
Yeah I guess I wanted to say tight space meaning they were on some kind of dock or something. All of them bunched together.
I continue to be struck by how dangerous CV-19 is for some people and how utterly benign it is for other people. I'm not going to pretend this is a situation for easy answers but should we really have Round 2 of locking down perfectly healthy people once again in order to protect the unhealthy and elderly? Or, should we quarantine (and thus protect) the unhealthy and elderly until a vaccine is available, while letting life get back to more-or-less normal for most people? The vast majority of people age 30 & under are not in danger from Covid. Of course that means all grade school kids and most college students. Ending on a positive note; there were zero Covid-related deaths reported in Michigan for the 24 hr. period ending about 10 hrs ago. And it wasn't related to lack of reporting on the holiday since there were 343 new cases reported. Outbreaks in a bar, restaurant, or strip club are nothing compared to outbreaks in nursing homes. And treatments are getting more effective also.
Um, because football is a high-contact sports in which large groups of panting players pile on top of each other. Maybe that's it?
They benefit by not spreading COVID to themselves or to their loved ones. The society benefit by getting rid of a transmission source. And this would be a lot more credible if it was not coming from a guy who makes millions on the backs of these student athletes.
No one disputes this point. Every interaction we take increases the risk of contracting and spreading the disease.
The point username and the referenced articles make is: does the risk substantially change if if happens on the field versus other social activities that these students may do?
its not something I’ve thought about until, it’s thought provoking for sure
Yes it increases the total number of contacts so its increased risk. Its also about being officially sponsored vs the actions of individuals. Bars should still be closed even if people will drink together at home and sports shouldn't be played if it increases risk even if they might go have drink in a frat basement instead
But why? Is it just because we live in a liability, litigious culture now?
The players are still free to play or not. They are free to gather with friends or not if they don’t/can’t play. They and their families are free to gather or not.
The line can be drawn in a lot of different places. We can’t necessarily assume that if we take the most conservative approach we will necessarily get a better or even different outcome.
Im playing devils advocate a bit here. It’s worth thinking on all sides of the equation .
Because a public health crises means your choices impact others and as such should be regulated. It might not be worth the resources to police parties in houses, that doesn't mean it should be sanctioned.
That is what is going on with the football situation. Not playing football won't guarantee no risk for the players, that doesn't mean the university should formally sanction and encourage the pursuit of an activity that we know will increase risk.
I think you are making this way to black and white. If statewide, Michigan is having very little community spread, a football game is not going to change that (crowds might, but that is a separate question). Having the game has great value to many people. The athletic department and other athletes who are largely supported by football revenue, The many fans who will get enjoyment out of the game. The players themselves.
if on the other hand East Lansing is having high community spread and Ann Arbor isn’t, it probably makes little sense to have an event that requires several hundred people to travel from East Lansing to Ann Arbor. Absent the issue of crowds, this isn’t so much about the football game as it is about the larger context of the magnitude of the heath crisis in the area where each team is from.
This might be a legitimate argument if Michigan only played intrasquad scrimmages this year
Not sure I made an argument so much as offered an alternative. Maybe I should have used an out of state school as an example? If in mid August none of the big ten states are having significant community spread (e.g. if they stay where they are today), I think they try to play. I suspect we’ll see a few states start to have problems, a few games get cancelled and by late October if not ear;ier, they will be cancelling enough games that they’ll give up.
I don't understand how people don't understand this. It's math.
Every single additional close interaction with another person is an additional opportunity to catch and/or spread the virus.
We're clocking 50k cases per day now. It could easily be 100k in a month. And where is that happening? Primarily the states that opened up early and quickly.
Data is no fun.
Better to fly blind and go with your gut. Also, I want football!
I think people get the math.
The argument in this thread isn’t whether to socially distance or not, it’s asking the question: to what degree does canceling football actually mean this group of 13k 18-22 year olds will socially distance?
Will it?
So then the argument essentially boils down to all college kids are going to get it anyway, so why not play football?
If schools are doing in person instruction, without restrictions, like they did before the rona, then I think you can make that argument. But if schools are taking significant steps to mitigate the risk of exposure, including moving classes online, I just don't see how they could justify playing football.
I want it back too. Just as badly as everyone else here does. I just don't think it's realistic given the current trends.
You're ignoring a whole bunch of other math though. If the chance of an individual catching the virus is 50% without playing football but 50.1% with football, does that .1% really make a difference? Are there other trade offs that make that .1% worth it? Pretending this is exclusively about reducing transmission and what's actually "essential" flies in the face of reality.
We see more cases probably because almost everything is opening up and ppl are getting tested to return to work. There was a study about ppl testing positive long after they showed symptoms and/or got infected, like upwards of 40 days afterwards. They analyzed the swabs and found that none of the material was “alive” to put it in laymen’s terms (for me since I’m not scientists). It wasn’t replicating or doing anything. The person was not infectious but shedding the non contagious remnants of the infection. Most of those states opened up 6-8 weeks ago. This would be about the time you would expect a “peak”. I was curious and checked the death total for each state, and it looks like New Jersey had over half the deaths for the whole country. I don’t know what their reopen plan was. Just thought it was interesting.
I agree with you on this one.
There is a Dennis Dodd article making the rounds this week. The link is below. He talked to some Doctor at UIUC who did the following calculations:
(1) If 13,000 student-athletes play college football this fall,
(2) we can expect 30%-50% of them to get infected, with 0.1% of them dying,
(3) thus, 3-7 college football players will die from COVID this fall. Thus, we shouldn't play college football.
Now, let's set aside the exact numbers he's using (that 0.1% in particular seems high to me, but fair enough for now). The fundamental error this guy is making is that these student-athletes would be doing something else in the absence of football.
So, we have no idea as to whether those 3-7 deaths would truly be attributable to football.
I'm honestly shocked at how many people --- including this Doctor --- don't consider the concept of incremental infections and incremental deaths. Look at all the various college football teams being tested now. Many of these players are positive even before they got back on campus! They're doing something or other, in the absence of football, that leads them to be infected.
Doctors are experts of medicine, not decision analysis. I’m not surprised at all that a doctor doesn’t understand the concept of finite alternatives or incremental value/cost.
That is a fair comment.
Dodd spoke to a PhD (computer science), not an MD, for what that may be worth here.
A computer scientists came up with those numbers, not a virologist.
CDC best guess death rate as of late May for ages 0-49, which is a huge range in my opinion, was 0.04%. I would guess the 18-22 would be half or less than half of that so around 0.02%, just considering the age 40-49 would probably be at a much higher risk than 18-22. At 50% infected and 0.02% it’s 1.3 players dying from covid. If it’s 30% infected, then 0.78 players die from covid. As a fan I would love to see football. I won’t say the players or coaches should have to deal with something they don’t feel comfortable with, whether they don’t want to catch it for themselves or spread it to others. The likelihood is a player may have died from the virus regardless of football being played or not. One benefit of having organized activities like this is the university and medical staff are going to be on top of everything. They are going to make sure when a player tests positive they will quarantine them and get them treatment if it’s severe (which I don’t think any cases in these athletes have been so far). If there is no football season, these players are now just regular ppl/students, a majority of whom won’t go and get tested. Same goes for the TV crews, staff, stadium maintenance, etc.
Yep, this is what I've been thinking / saying as well.
It's probably correct that 30-50% of college football players will get it by 2021 but is that more likely to happen if they're playing football? Probably not. They might get it a little faster playing football but if they're still in school they're getting it eventually.
And if they're not in school? That's arguably worse, because even if fewer of them get it, say 15-25%, they're more likely to give it to their parents or grandparents which is a lot worse than having them on campus.
No one is looking at this thing in terms of tradeoffs.
"No link because I have not taken the four minutes required to figure out how to link an article."
You spent longer than that typing your missive! And it doesn't take 4 minutes to copy a link, click the chain link icon in the edit box, and paste the link. You're just being lazy...
Agreed.
If football is not played, it won’t be because of concerns about players health. I suspect that any credible, objective analysis would conclude that playing football presents a greater health risk than covid (unless we find out more about long term health impacts even in asymptomatic cases).
If football is not played, it will be because of concerns about community spread including:
1. The game is in an area with lots of community spread where hospitals are near capacity and healthcare is being rationed (like Houston right now) - at least some governors might ban large events like college football (hundreds of people even without fans).
2. One team is in an area of low spread and another has high spread. Travel restrictions prevent the game from being played.
3. One team has too many team members test positive and with quarantine of close contacts, can’t field a team.
if in August it looks like many games in a conference won’t be able to happen because of #1 and #2, I think the season gets cancelled for that conference. If not, I think they give it a go, knowing some games may be cancelled and we may reach a point that the rest of the season will get called off.
I’m a bit perplexed at the inconsistency of the prevailing view that thousands of people in close groups, with mixed day-to-day population and contact (some masked some not), outside shouting and chanting (protesting) had no significant contribution to community spread, yet tens of people (Maybe on the order of ~200-300 for a game) playing an outdoor sport in siloed groups (by each week), with close monitoring and advanced health resources, will significantly contribute to community spread. Just seems contradictory. I get that #2 above might be unique to CFB, but it’s not like all protesters were local either.
I'm so fucking sick of hearing people compare the activities being cancelled (or considered to be cancelled) to the Black Lives Matter protests. NO ONE thinks the protests didn't actually contribute to an increase in COVID but in addition to a pandemic we also have a very important social movement happening that can't just wait until COVID is over. Human rights is important and therefore worthy of the additional risk is brought (I wish some of the participants had been safer about it but that's that).
This is a college football season. It's cool, I love college football. I'm someone who spends an inordinate amount of my time on a college football blog. But please don't act like having a football season is as important to our society as a human rights movement because you make yourself look ignorant. End of rant.
NO ONE thinks the protests didn't actually contribute to an increase in COVID
read this thread (and others), people ARE making this claim, repeatedly.
I agree with you completely that the value of the activity needs to be weighed against the increased risk. I agree completely that advancing human rights is more important to society than college football. That is a different discussion and subject than whether or not, and by how much, these activities incrementally increase C19 community spread.
Please show me where I said, implied, or “acted” like CFB was as important as human rights. I’m not going to use the word “ignorant” like you did, but maybe take a breath and think about what was actually written before making assumptions and replying.