Is a 2021 season going to happen?

[tech37]

Looks like the entire fall slate of college sports is about to be cancelled, this is either really bad news for lacrosse in the spring, or it will help keep numbers down and lead to somewhat more normal life. I fear it is bad news, the next step is cancelling winter sports which are held indoors and athletes often have close contact, like basketball and wrestling. If winter sports don't start in January with good results spring sports will be in real jeopardy. Pray for the vaccine, I think it is our only hope for the spring.

"Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla said Thursday clinical trials should reveal by October whether the company’s vaccine against the Coronavirus strain Covid-19 is safe and effective."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapse ... 7bf57ea190

There are a few good vaccines in development with promising results (both Moderna and Oxford released preliminary results of their vaccines last month), but even after these trials, they still have to scale up production. Pfizer is saying they will produce 100 million doses starting in 4th quarter, which sounds great - but their vaccine requires 2 doses. So 50 million people can be immunized with their vaccine (assuming it gets approved). Assume the health care workers and elderly/immune compromised are first to get them.

They've been producing that vaccine for months to get to this point - so it's not like they will have more than 100 million doses by December. That's their "stretch goal" - the Forbes article makes it sound far more concrete than the actual [url=https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/07/ ... 20approval.]DHHS official release[/ur]. It'll be awhile before a vaccine is readily available.

And then Pulp, when safe vaccines are available, will Americans get vaccinated? We are not the most intelligent folks inhabiting this planet.

[bauer4429]

Certainly a good year for players that can to take a gap year. Maybe do a few online courses train and come back for 2021/2022 ready to go in a more normal setting. Not looking good for football and that will have impact.

[Matnum PI]

And then Pulp, when safe vaccines are available, will Americans get vaccinated? We are not the most intelligent folks inhabiting this planet.

Listened to the NY Times podcast on this. the answer is, in large numbers, no.

[Wheels]

Will be very interesting to see the psychological reaction to the announcement of a vaccine. Will Americans react similarly to when "re-openings" occurred? Head out in droves? Celebrate? Party?

Or will Americans social distance and wear masks until enough of the population receives the vaccine to get to sufficient levels of herd immunity?

How that plays out will probably determine whether or not we see any sports in the spring.

[PulpExposure]

I hope so! Important to note though that none of those preliminary results show anything about the vaccine preventing transmission of COVID, they just have looked at antibody production. The current Phase 3 trials, which mean something a little different here than usual, are the first trials to see if these vaccines actually work. I suspect they will and also believe a large percentage of the population has at least some T-cell mediated immunity from prior non-COVID coronavirus exposure (this fits the data from several well done studies, the fact that there has not been a second wave anywhere in the world that was previously hard hit and also is one of several reasons to explain why kids are so spared, not just not having severe sx but not getting/passing it in general at anywhere near the rates of older people... more frequent and recent colds, more partial cross immunity). Agree absolutely with the tempering of enthusiasm on the dose numbers, there is NOT going to be enough vaccine even if it works to vaccinate everyone this winter.

Thank you - super important to point out that first part! What's interesting is I can't tell what's continuation of first wave or what is second wave. I work in a global company, and while by and large everyone else has fared better than us, we're starting to see some flare ups. Most notably, Israel is getting hit hard - they got hit hard at first, then they went full shutdown to the point where they had less than 10 cases per day. Then they opened up school, and now they're in a second wave. I can't tell if Germany is in a second wave, but the news from my colleagues over there isn't great either.

But it's a drop in the bucket next to us. Like Spain is having a flare up, with 50,000 new cases reported last month. Florida...with half the population of Spain, had 300k new cases in the same span.

If we were responsible, maybe...but we've mismanaged how we handled this pandemic so badly, I have little faith.

Will be very interesting to see the psychological reaction to the announcement of a vaccine. Will Americans react similarly to when "re-openings" occurred? Head out in droves? Celebrate? Party?

Or will Americans social distance and wear masks until enough of the population receives the vaccine to get to sufficient levels of herd immunity?

How that plays out will probably determine whether or not we see any sports in the spring.

I'm assuming it'll be party time and few will be responsible.

[pcowlax]

We will just have to wait and see, not hopeful on the season. I wish I could paste the World-O-Meter graphs here but just look at them. Israel had a previous mild outbreak, then went down to nothing, now has a lot of cases. This is their first real wave. Germany had a big first wave (with excellent mortality rates) and now has very little. There are slightly more cases now than in June and July but no spike and virtually zero deaths. It is inevitable when cases get very low and people start getting on with their lives, as they must, that they will climb slightly (and as we head to colder weather in cold weather states) but if there is a large percentage of the population now with immunity or at least partial immunity via both B and T-cell mechanisms then we should not see another large spike in those areas and we have not. The whole purpose, which has completely been lost in the hysteria, of closing down the world was NOT to make it go away, not to stop it, not, frankly, to reduce the number of people who caught it. It was just to spread the cases out over time so hospitals were not overwhelmed. Outside of Italy and 1 or 2 hospitals in New York, that has worked. Most of Europe has opened up school with no spikes at all, Israel is an exception but did not have it bad in the first place. COVID is not the flu, clearly. But no one pays any attention to the detains of the figures they see or has any understanding of statistics. If you made the same graphs for cases and deaths with influenza and started showing them without telling people they were the flu and not COVID, at this point there would be the same panic and same hate mongering on states or areas that are spiking because of how "irresponsible" they are. Viruses move around, in a continent sized country of 350 million people they will spread, first worse in some areas, then in others. The continued desire to politicize this, as with everything in our f-ed up society, is disgusting and, what's more, profoundly stupid. In a few months you will be able to take the number of cases per capita per state, adjust for population density/number of urban areas over a certain population and adjust for traffic at international airports and the results will be very similar across the board (maybe with exception for obvious reasons of Hawaii). Outside of the literal murder of sending COVID patients back into nursing homes, state by state policy is not going to make a difference.

[Matnum PI]

B1G
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/college- ... n/33576521

[PulpExposure]

We will just have to wait and see, not hopeful on the season. I wish I could paste the World-O-Meter graphs here but just look at them. Israel had a previous mild outbreak, then went down to nothing, now has a lot of cases.

So not for nothing - here you need some more context you may not know for Israel. By the middle of April they had 10k cases, and that's after they had put the whole country on mandatory lockdown (they did it in mid march actually). They went from less than a thousand cases to 10k in about 10 days at that point. Sort of the similar rate of change as Germany had at first. But then they locked it down, and they really flattened the curve. They're a small and densely populated country (think size and population of New Jersey, but with the bottom 1/3 of the country essentially uninhabited). I cut it there for you - you can see the delta was not good at first, and then it levels off completely because of the measures they took. And then blew up again lol.

israel.PNG (16.38 KiB) Viewed 3014 times

Side note I was actually in Israel for work two weeks before they started shutting everything down....

[DocBarrister]

B1G
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/college- ... n/33576521

https://www.espn.com/college-football/s ... yes-spring

PAC-12 has followed suit.

DocBarrister

[pcowlax]

We will just have to wait and see, not hopeful on the season. I wish I could paste the World-O-Meter graphs here but just look at them. Israel had a previous mild outbreak, then went down to nothing, now has a lot of cases.

So not for nothing - here you need some more context you may not know for Israel. By the middle of April they had 10k cases, and that's after they had put the whole country on mandatory lockdown (they did it in mid march actually). They went from less than a thousand cases to 10k in about 10 days at that point. Sort of the similar rate of change as Germany had at first. But then they locked it down, and they really flattened the curve. They're a small and densely populated country (think size and population of New Jersey, but with the bottom 1/3 of the country essentially uninhabited). I cut it there for you - you can see the delta was not good at first, and then it levels off completely because of the measures they took. And then blew up again lol.

israel.PNG

Side note I was actually in Israel for work two weeks before they started shutting everything down....

I don't know why I can't paste anything into here. Israel had a peak of 765 cases April 2 and a peak 3 day average of 720 then. It then trended down as everywhere that has locked down trended down and then, as is absolutely necessary for the survival of civilization, it opened up again. The first wave was not much at all when you look at cases per million. The population was mostly still naive and, as you say, is fairly dense. So away they went, peaking at 2308 July 28 and now starting to trend down again. The figure is the same for most every country in the world. The figure is the same for the US if you look at it by region rather than as a country as a whole. It is very different fighting and tracking a virus when your while country is the size of New Jersey. Its generally not helpful to look at the graphs showing cumulative cases, the one with incident cases by day are much easier to see the trends with. The other European countries where it was bad (much worse than Israel) have managed to open back up without a second wave. Here in CT is was bad, cases are now extremely low, but they many towns still are not letting schools open for F2F. The bar cannot be no cases or zero spread, that just isn't how respiratory viruses work.

[cc2519]

We will just have to wait and see, not hopeful on the season. I wish I could paste the World-O-Meter graphs here but just look at them. Israel had a previous mild outbreak, then went down to nothing, now has a lot of cases. This is their first real wave. Germany had a big first wave (with excellent mortality rates) and now has very little. There are slightly more cases now than in June and July but no spike and virtually zero deaths. It is inevitable when cases get very low and people start getting on with their lives, as they must, that they will climb slightly (and as we head to colder weather in cold weather states) but if there is a large percentage of the population now with immunity or at least partial immunity via both B and T-cell mechanisms then we should not see another large spike in those areas and we have not. The whole purpose, which has completely been lost in the hysteria, of closing down the world was NOT to make it go away, not to stop it, not, frankly, to reduce the number of people who caught it. It was just to spread the cases out over time so hospitals were not overwhelmed. Outside of Italy and 1 or 2 hospitals in New York, that has worked. Most of Europe has opened up school with no spikes at all, Israel is an exception but did not have it bad in the first place. COVID is not the flu, clearly. But no one pays any attention to the detains of the figures they see or has any understanding of statistics. If you made the same graphs for cases and deaths with influenza and started showing them without telling people they were the flu and not COVID, at this point there would be the same panic and same hate mongering on states or areas that are spiking because of how "irresponsible" they are. Viruses move around, in a continent sized country of 350 million people they will spread, first worse in some areas, then in others. The continued desire to politicize this, as with everything in our f-ed up society, is disgusting and, what's more, profoundly stupid. In a few months you will be able to take the number of cases per capita per state, adjust for population density/number of urban areas over a certain population and adjust for traffic at international airports and the results will be very similar across the board (maybe with exception for obvious reasons of Hawaii). Outside of the literal murder of sending COVID patients back into nursing homes, state by state policy is not going to make a difference.

+1000 (is that a thing?)

[cc2519]

We will just have to wait and see, not hopeful on the season. I wish I could paste the World-O-Meter graphs here but just look at them. Israel had a previous mild outbreak, then went down to nothing, now has a lot of cases.

So not for nothing - here you need some more context you may not know for Israel. By the middle of April they had 10k cases, and that's after they had put the whole country on mandatory lockdown (they did it in mid march actually). They went from less than a thousand cases to 10k in about 10 days at that point. Sort of the similar rate of change as Germany had at first. But then they locked it down, and they really flattened the curve. They're a small and densely populated country (think size and population of New Jersey, but with the bottom 1/3 of the country essentially uninhabited). I cut it there for you - you can see the delta was not good at first, and then it levels off completely because of the measures they took. And then blew up again lol.

israel.PNG

Side note I was actually in Israel for work two weeks before they started shutting everything down....

I don't know why I can't paste anything into here. Israel had a peak of 765 cases April 2 and a peak 3 day average of 720 then. It then trended down as everywhere that has locked down trended down and then, as is absolutely necessary for the survival of civilization, it opened up again. The first wave was not much at all when you look at cases per million. The population was mostly still naive and, as you say, is fairly dense. So away they went, peaking at 2308 July 28 and now starting to trend down again. The figure is the same for most every country in the world. The figure is the same for the US if you look at it by region rather than as a country as a whole. It is very different fighting and tracking a virus when your while country is the size of New Jersey. Its generally not helpful to look at the graphs showing cumulative cases, the one with incident cases by day are much easier to see the trends with. The other European countries where it was bad (much worse than Israel) have managed to open back up without a second wave. Here in CT is was bad, cases are now extremely low, but they many towns still are not letting schools open for F2F. The bar cannot be no cases or zero spread, that just isn't how respiratory viruses work.

Right again. Most people have NO CLUE how respiratory viruses (or any other communicable disease) work. They follow Farr's Law on local/regional basis. They always have, and always will. The amount of ignorance (and I don't mean that in a pejorative way) about all this is amazing. One example: most people think that "antibodies" are the main way our immune systems fight infections, and that if you get AB tested and are negative, it means you haven't had Covid. Not (necessarily) true! T cells etc are actually more powerful than AB, and will not show up on a Covid AB test. But many people have T cells that have fought off previous coronaviruses. Which may be why NOWHERE in the world have we seen true "exponential growth" of Covid.

We are ruining livelihoods, childhoods (and yes college athletics) in pursuit of a pipe dream ("crushing" or stopping a respiratory virus.)

[ICGrad]

I would be surprised if there is a full (i.e., regular and post-season) lacrosse season this spring.

As someone who is currently sick with COVID, though with a fairly mild (so far) case, I can say that this thing has the potential to knock you on your ass. The fatigue alone is enough to take players out for large stretches, possibly whole seasons. I'm athletic, regularly running 7 miles per day (with a past as a marathon runner), and I doubt I could run half a mile right now. Given the level of athletic performance demanded of these athletes, it's hard to imagine anyone with even a mild case being able to suit up and take the field.

I can see a scenario where schools try to initiate some sort of modified season, but have to abandon it as too many teams face multiple positive tests - kind of like what we're seeing with baseball right now, but with teams be far less able to control all of the variables.

[DocBarrister]

I would be surprised if there is a full (i.e., regular and post-season) lacrosse season this spring.

As someone who is currently sick with COVID, though with a fairly mild (so far) case, I can say that this thing has the potential to knock you on your ass. The fatigue alone is enough to take players out for large stretches, possibly whole seasons. I'm athletic, regularly running 7 miles per day (with a past as a marathon runner), and I doubt I could run half a mile right now. Given the level of athletic performance demanded of these athletes, it's hard to imagine anyone with even a mild case being able to suit up and take the field.

I can see a scenario where schools try to initiate some sort of modified season, but have to abandon it as too many teams face multiple positive tests - kind of like what we're seeing with baseball right now, but with teams be far less able to control all of the variables.

First, best wishes and get well soon (I know ... “get well soon” frequently doesn’t happen with Covid-19).

Second, I think you may turn out to be correct. Here’s hopin’ for the best.

DocBarrister

[JoeMauer89]

We will just have to wait and see, not hopeful on the season. I wish I could paste the World-O-Meter graphs here but just look at them. Israel had a previous mild outbreak, then went down to nothing, now has a lot of cases.

So not for nothing - here you need some more context you may not know for Israel. By the middle of April they had 10k cases, and that's after they had put the whole country on mandatory lockdown (they did it in mid march actually). They went from less than a thousand cases to 10k in about 10 days at that point. Sort of the similar rate of change as Germany had at first. But then they locked it down, and they really flattened the curve. They're a small and densely populated country (think size and population of New Jersey, but with the bottom 1/3 of the country essentially uninhabited). I cut it there for you - you can see the delta was not good at first, and then it levels off completely because of the measures they took. And then blew up again lol.

israel.PNG

Side note I was actually in Israel for work two weeks before they started shutting everything down....

I don't know why I can't paste anything into here. Israel had a peak of 765 cases April 2 and a peak 3 day average of 720 then. It then trended down as everywhere that has locked down trended down and then, as is absolutely necessary for the survival of civilization, it opened up again. The first wave was not much at all when you look at cases per million. The population was mostly still naive and, as you say, is fairly dense. So away they went, peaking at 2308 July 28 and now starting to trend down again. The figure is the same for most every country in the world. The figure is the same for the US if you look at it by region rather than as a country as a whole. It is very different fighting and tracking a virus when your while country is the size of New Jersey. Its generally not helpful to look at the graphs showing cumulative cases, the one with incident cases by day are much easier to see the trends with. The other European countries where it was bad (much worse than Israel) have managed to open back up without a second wave. Here in CT is was bad, cases are now extremely low, but they many towns still are not letting schools open for F2F. The bar cannot be no cases or zero spread, that just isn't how respiratory viruses work.

Right again. Most people have NO CLUE how respiratory viruses (or any other communicable disease) work. They follow Farr's Law on local/regional basis. They always have, and always will. The amount of ignorance (and I don't mean that in a pejorative way) about all this is amazing. One example: most people think that "antibodies" are the main way our immune systems fight infections, and that if you get AB tested and are negative, it means you haven't had Covid. Not (necessarily) true! T cells etc are actually more powerful than AB, and will not show up on a Covid AB test. But many people have T cells that have fought off previous coronaviruses. Which may be why NOWHERE in the world have we seen true "exponential growth" of Covid.

We are ruining livelihoods, childhoods (and yes college athletics) in pursuit of a pipe dream ("crushing" or stopping a respiratory virus.)

+1 Million

The COVID-19 Forum is turned into a real sorry place. There's no discussion at all, it's just blindly posting articles to see who can be more negative. If you don't have a viewpoint that falls in line with the regular posters, you are criticized, ostracized, denigrated to the point you either give up, agree to disagree or some combination of both. Most of the regulars spend the entire time trying to prove one poster wrong, who often has salient points. He just happens to ruffle feathers in bringing these across, which is NOT WRONG. If you don't believe the sky is falling, stay out of that forum because you are not allowed to bring an opposing viewpoint. If this forum had as many users as lets say Twitter, it would be a lot more interesting from my perspective. As someone who reads through a large, diverse amount of viewpoints about the virus on a daily basis, there are a lot of intelligent people that would be able to defend their viewpoints quite well against these negative bunch of regular posters. Again, not saying things are all rosy, but being constantly negative in regards to every aspect of life during the pandemic does absolutely nothing to help the situation, nothing at all! End of rant...

Craziest NHL game in a long time tonight!

Go Twins,
Joemauer89!





Craziest NHL Game in a long time!

Go Twins,
Joemauer89!

[FMUBart]

The debate is decidedly political(thanks for the blatantly obvious, I know!)... After the election, the virus debate will end...unless, of course Trump is re-elected. Then the same nonsense will be spewed by the media..

[Wheels]

The debate is decidedly political(thanks for the blatantly obvious, I know!)... After the election, the virus debate will end...unless, of course Trump is re-elected. Then the same nonsense will be spewed by the media..

Yes, Trump has been totally blameless in making any of this political. Wait, where is my mask?

[Wheels]

I would be surprised if there is a full (i.e., regular and post-season) lacrosse season this spring.

As someone who is currently sick with COVID, though with a fairly mild (so far) case, I can say that this thing has the potential to knock you on your ass. The fatigue alone is enough to take players out for large stretches, possibly whole seasons. I'm athletic, regularly running 7 miles per day (with a past as a marathon runner), and I doubt I could run half a mile right now. Given the level of athletic performance demanded of these athletes, it's hard to imagine anyone with even a mild case being able to suit up and take the field.

I can see a scenario where schools try to initiate some sort of modified season, but have to abandon it as too many teams face multiple positive tests - kind of like what we're seeing with baseball right now, but with teams be far less able to control all of the variables.

When the B1G shut down fall sports, a reporter from The Athletic reported that in their discussion of medical issues, they were all told that 10 B1G athletes had developed the heart condition that knocked Jules Henninberg out of the PLL for this season. The B1G Commish denied that the specific heart-related information was the most impactful piece of information, but as a fan and alum of a university that had a player die of multi-organ failure from heat stroke, I'm gonna guess that the bit of heart-related information stood out.

[PulpExposure]

The bar cannot be no cases or zero spread, that just isn't how respiratory viruses work.

Nope - but it's minimizing spread to avoid overwhelming hospitals. You have to be proactive and think ahead - that's what most of the world did, and where we have not done.

[ICGrad]

I would be surprised if there is a full (i.e., regular and post-season) lacrosse season this spring.

As someone who is currently sick with COVID, though with a fairly mild (so far) case, I can say that this thing has the potential to knock you on your ass. The fatigue alone is enough to take players out for large stretches, possibly whole seasons. I'm athletic, regularly running 7 miles per day (with a past as a marathon runner), and I doubt I could run half a mile right now. Given the level of athletic performance demanded of these athletes, it's hard to imagine anyone with even a mild case being able to suit up and take the field.

I can see a scenario where schools try to initiate some sort of modified season, but have to abandon it as too many teams face multiple positive tests - kind of like what we're seeing with baseball right now, but with teams be far less able to control all of the variables.

When the B1G shut down fall sports, a reporter from The Athletic reported that in their discussion of medical issues, they were all told that 10 B1G athletes had developed the heart condition that knocked Jules Henninberg out of the PLL for this season. The B1G Commish denied that the specific heart-related information was the most impactful piece of information, but as a fan and alum of a university that had a player die of multi-organ failure from heat stroke, I'm gonna guess that the bit of heart-related information stood out.

I'd love to get more comprehensive metrics for this, though it doesn't appear that any are forthcoming.

There have been a number of instances of multiple members of a team testing positive. including with some big-name SEC football programs. How many of those kids are developing symptoms, and how many of those are struggling with substantial illness? What types of secondary and long-term effects are these kids seeing?

12 members of a football team testing positive is an alarming event, but if none of them are becoming ill it is less alarming. But if half of that 12 are getting ill enough to miss school and/or be knocked out of their sport for an extended period of time, that is significant. And if some of those are developing life-threatening heart conditions (as appears to have been the case with some programs in the B1G Conference), then it really changes the entirety of the conversation.

Looks like I'll be getting an EKG and some oxygen work before I (eventually) resume my running regimen.