What is the Possibility That Some Sports Simply End? Could There be a Permanent Covid Contraction?
Mates,
I came across this article about MLB and how the players and owners seem pretty far apart about starting a season. And even if they reach an agreement, what if there is even the slightest fly in the ointment re: C-19 issues re-emerging? I wonder also about the downstream effects of having cancelled a bunch of other spring sports and conceivably some or all of the fall sports for kids all the way up through college. What effect will having what amounts to a 'gap year' on sports have across the age groups?
Do you run the risk of all of the sports having a permanently, and possibly significant, reduced level of participation? So you cancel MLB or the NBA this year, does anyone even care about it next year? If kids don't get to play this summer, do you suddenly permanently lose maybe 50% of the young players? For instance, we have frequently talked about declining participation in football and does a cancelled season greatly accelerate the issue? Do you literally wipe out whole smaller school teams, grade schools right up through high schools?
Anyway, here is the article that talks about the MLB impasse: https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29307988/mlb-players-reject-latest-offer-ask-league-set-2020-season-schedule
Tonight's question/issue: If there is a 'gap year' for sports, do you think we permanently end or reduce participation in those sports or, for instance, permanently choke out smaller schools at all age levels that were just barely fielding teams in the first place?
Hope you are all enjoying a fine Summer evening,
XM
There is money to help those hospitals that are dealing with Covid. What seems more likely, that hospitals are missing Covid on a regular basis, giving up on revenue, or that some cases are being missed here and there?
There's an incentive to over-count, ergo there's a disincentive to under-count.
I'm sure your articles there make valid points about certain cases being missed. I have a hard time believing the #s are high enough to significantly change the statistics - particularly as testing has gone up.
There's also a pesky thing called malpractice, and you have to believe not just one or two but ALL HOSPITALS are willing to risk the very real threat of punishments from the government if it's discovered they are miscounting deaths to get more money. And then you have to somehow explain the cause of all those extra deaths anyway - far more than we expect this time of year.
The evidence just don't support you in any way. Stop believing in conspiracies.
I believe in statistics and logic, not conspiracies. Trust me, disagreeing with you is not a conspiracy. I believe the numbers right now are within some not horrible degree of accurate. Are they perfect? They never are, so no. I believe there are some under-counted, and I believe there are some over-counted. Those all balance out, and then there's a few more on one side or the other. I don't _KNOW_ which, but it feels more likely that it's over- rather than under- because money.
I don't like the term, but "follow the money". What's more likely, a situation like Philadelphia, where they counted too many and then, 'adjusted' to correct later, or that there is some sudden rash of dead people who never see a medical examiner at all and despite obvious signs of pneumonia-like symptoms nobody even bothers to check for Covid? Maybe, MAYBE that happened in April, in NYC, but our hospitals haven't gotten overwhelmed, so the odds that the med examiners were just you know, blowing off bodies and sending them to the oven is ... not good. Do I think hospitals are committing malpractice? Of course not, but a patient comes in, dies of influenza, tests positive for Covid, it's not hard to say Covid killed them - I heard a term "death from Covid vs. death with Covid". Dying with Covid can still get a person counted.
Could I be wrong, and could there be a wild under-count that doubles the mortality rate, sure - but that doesn't play with the mortality #s from around the world. Our rates are higher than most places, with the exceptions being (mostly) places where the medical facilities didn't keep up. So if most places who did keep up are below us, the EVIDENCE does in fact support me. Could everybody else's #'s be wrong, sure. But that's still more of a stretch than saying, "let's stick with the #'s we have, and assume they're close enough to accurate to learn from." Ok? Great. Thanks. Have a nice day.
As I noted above, I don’t think we actually disagree. I was just countering the conspiracy argument above about the belief that there is a significant over-count. I think there is plenty of evidence that is not true.
First, I’m not arguing there is a significant undercount. I’m responding to Comments arguing there is an over count. The argument is based on several things: 1) not all deaths happen in hospitals (thus your counter argument doesn’t address the biggest potential area for undercounting; 2) looking at excess deaths. Both suggest that if anything there is an undercount. Sorry if ai’m gonna go with folks from CDC on this over your theory.
Ah you know “people in the field.” Which means you watch Fox News
In fast, the broad consensus among medical experts is that the actual number of deaths is perhaps double for the simple reason that not everybody who died of covid was tested or went to a hospital. The total number of cases is actually immense; only 5 percent of the country has been tested. You’re just spouting bullshit.
Fox News is too liberal and accountable for this new wave of conspiracy theorists.
They make their own news (hence the "people investigating it) and tell you their "findings" are true until you prove them wrong.
THE FREEDOMS!!! WON’T ANYONE THINK OF THE FREEDOMS!
Where are you getting this 1% mortality figure? Everything I’ve seen has it right at 5-6%.
5-6% is calculated by deaths divided by confirmed cases. But from antibody testing done on a large scale in cities across the country, we know that many millions who had Covid never received a test. This would include people who just rode it out at home, people who couldn’t get a test because of scarcity in the early months and Millions of people who were Asymptomatic. If you divide deaths by projected cases (as you do with every other disease including the flu), the rate is well below 1%. Higher than the flu, but not by that much. Moreover, the rate amongst all age groups below 50 is almost identical to that of the flu.
Some people still think this kills 5% of people. Absolutely unbelievable.
Yeah all that medical science and shit.
What?
You have no idea what youre talking about. I know thats par for the course for you. It's hilarious to me you think youre on the side of science.
I think there are two different issues you are discussion here: the impact of a lost year on kids participation and the impact of a lost year on smaller (presumably collegiate) schools. I think it is different. Sports are embedded enough in our culture/psyche that I don't think 1 year of not playing is going to significantly reduce participation rates. It is not like during the lost year some of the12 year olds are getting a leg up on those that aren't playing. I don't know about 2 years. I think that might be a different story.
As far as small schools go, I think a lost year could have huge ramifications with cut sports being one of them. It is not just the kids who don't get a chance to play, its the mounting costs of everything and costs needing to be trimmed somewhere. I think the non-revenue sports are likely to be cut from many, many schools D1 all the way down to D3. And yes, for the D2 and D3 schools, that probably means football. I don't think this will have a huge impact of youth participation because most kids don't keep playing with the dream of playing at a D3 school. They play at D3 school because they love it and they get 4 more years to play in an organized way.
Outside of the power 5 conferences just about every sport is a non-revenue sport, even football and basketball.
Absolutely not. Sports are a permanent part of society that aren't just going to go away cus of a pandemic for a year. The MLB could be in trouble and needs to make some changes asap, but I don't think any sports are just going to disappear
This is quite obviously true. And frankly it sounds ridiculous that some sports are going to end even if there's a vaccine. I don't know what's going in with the MLB, but if they can't get their shit figured out, it's their fault. Or the government's. Somehow sports have survived lockouts and strikes before, but now people think they're not going to survive because of people's real concerns over a pandemic.
New Zealand now has rugby games with crowds. Why? Because they decided to do a totally half-assed lockdown that didn't really apply in most of the country and during that time they didn't increase testing that much or tracing or any of that. Their prime minister just kept talking about how it was going to end soon. They just kind of let it run its course at a medium-grade level. Oh wait, no. That's not what happened there.
Baseball has been on the downtrend for a while and has barely attempted to help their cause at all. This standoff between players and owners isn't helping either. It's also kinda ironic that baseball is the sport that is having the most issues when it was the sport that people thought would be least affected
Wake me up when the United States becomes two small islands, 1500+ miles from their nearest neighbor, with a population of under 5 million people and over 25 million sheep.
Comparisons to New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are all fundamentally flawed, as they are all either islands or essentially islands.
The United States is more geographically isolated than Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as well as having a significantly lower population density per square mile than any of those countries. If you're a first world, developed country, then being an island is no assurance against protection from a pandemic, because air travel. Bottom line, the US has done a very poor job in responding to the pandemic as compared to many countries in Asia and the Pacific Rim.
Major sports are just another form of entertainment. It's also a form that can have participation without being present at the venue. If the product can compete with other forms that are consumed from people's living rooms, they will survive. Otherwise, they will wither and possibly die.
I grew up with five-day cricket. While I still judge the mettle of a player in that format, I only catch up with highlights once every day. There is still a solid minority who follows every minute of it. And that's why it's still alive. But the biggest draw currently is a much shorter version that allows it to compete with other entertainments that span about 3 hours.
While growing up, Indian movies used to be 2.5 hrs at a minimum. Now most of them are in the 1 hrs 40 mins - 2 hr 10 mins time frame.
For baseball, the biggest problem is too many games and too steep a price to attend. I have attended one game to date, using discounted tickets from my employer. Assuming I am "average", I can see a lot many folks are in my situation.
I think events that are too niche will go over to smaller stadia and streaming options. Babyboomers are retiring. GenX and Millennials are still not large enough to fill their seats.
I have gone from an avid sports fan to not giving a damn in 3 months. I lived and breathed Michigan football and I don’t give a damn if they play. Our society is moving closer and closer to outright civil war. Do I think Covid will end sports? No. I do think there is a decent chance that we will have serious, omnipresent cultural upheaval in the next year and that professional and college sports simply wont be practical and will not have a place in our culture for a period of time.
Now you know why the Constitution is under fire. What used to be wrong and immoral... is now framed as right. Once you believe that, the government owns you.
I am not sure I follow the logic here. Can you please explain? Are you saying that if the government must recognize a "right"--i.e., they can't ban it or put people in prison for doing it--the government "owns" you?
None of it matters anyway, we are eliminating the police so there will be nobody to enforce any lockdown anyway, member?
I don't know you, but this is the shittiest most white-entitled response I can imagine. I really hope this was an offhand joke that you now regret.
can you explain this? i have no idea how that applies to what was said, i must have missed something very important.
I think ijohnb is talking about defunding the police slogan/movement.
john's comment was easy to discern. it was the response that has me mystified.
You may be the most melodramatic mgoblogger out there. It is funny to listen to people talk about those concerned about Covid as over-reacting and then see you babble on about civil war and a cultural upheaval that will make sports impractical.
Sports survived world war 2, players strikes, olympic boycotts, they’ll survive this too.
melodramatic and overreacting to COVID...hot damn...that IS AMAZING.
Welcome to the real world.
You can't cover your expenses with revenue... your don't have a sport.
Nothing is free
Winner, winner chicken dinner.
The big fallout from the COVID epidemic in regards to sports, and pretty much everything else, isn’t going to be from what has happened so far, but rather how things are going to different in the future.
Understandably, right now there still seems to be a blind determination by many to just push ahead to try to get everything back to normal as quickly as possibly. As a result I think we’re seeing a lot hesitation from many individuals and organizations to truly acknowledge the situation they’re in and an attempt to delay the choices that they’re going to have to make.
But eventually, whether it’s for financial, health or other reasons, a lot of people are going to be forced to acknowledge the reality they’re in and change their lives accordingly.
Regardless of how long the pandemic itself lasts, once the large scale realization sets in that there simply isn’t going to be return to the things were before, that’s when we’re going to see A LOT of things change. Many things we’re used to are going to go away, some new things we’re not used to are going to become common, and there isn’t going to be a part of society as we know it that won’t be permanently altered in some significant way.
I never thought anything would eclipse 9/11 as the defining event of my lifetime, but the pandemic has left it in the dust. God help us if something eclipses the pandemic.
I couldn't possibly disagree more. This thing is basically run its course and it was a slightly strong flu. Nothing to ruin a country over or permanently change society. I can't believe people have fallen for all of the hype.
“This thing is basically run its course and it was a slightly strong flu.”
My dude, shoving your fingers in your ears, closing your eyes and shouting “LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” is all good and dandy, but it doesn’t change the fact that the daily data coming in and almost every medical expert disagrees with you.
You’re free to disagree as much as you want, but your belief is ignorant and wrong and the facts and numbers prove it.
People like you have been downplaying this from the start and you’ve been wrong every step of the way. Yet you still refuse to learn that Mother Nature doesn’t give a flying fuck what you, or anyone else, want to believe and she isn’t going to tailor her actions to fit whatever narrative any person or group is trying to sell.
The hospitals and morgues are full of people who believed “It’s just the flu” and it blows my mind how you morons continue to think you can just deny and bully a virus into submission.
Even if it is just a superflu, the point is that massive portions of our economy will continue to be significantly impacted. Not just healthcare ... basically all leisure activities, and many other discretionary consumer behaviors.
If you're one of the people who never interacts with older people, I suppose the threat is less in your face and can seem like hype. But if you happen to pause and think of anyone other than yourself for a moment, it isn't hard to understand that you might get it (and maybe that's no big whoop to your individual situation), and then pass it on to your friend/co-worker/barista/anyone who does have a parent/grandparent in their 60s or older (especially if they happen to have a co-morbidity trait like excess weight and/or any number of existing disease patterns). That's how "just a slightly strong flu" threatens to keep killing thousands of people ... and why it isn't the least bit irrational for society broadly to have changed its behavior patterns. Including for something as trivial as sports.
In 2017/2018 a recent strong flu season, the flu killed about 4800 people in NEw York. So far Covid has killed over 30,000, so for New York, roughly a factor of 5 times more deaths.
In that same flu season it killed 61,000 Americans or about 185 per million. To date, Covid has killed about 350 per million so it is closing in on about twice the flu deaths from the 2017-2018 season. However, only 20 states are above 184 deaths per million, so for wide swaths of the country, Covid hasn’t even been as bad as a bad flu season.
Has it run it’s course? Twenty States are seeing trends of increasing test positivity. If the number of tests you are doing is staying constant or increasing, that tends to be s measure that you are seeing growth in actual cases. As has been pointed out in other threads, a number of states are seeing increased hospitalizations. None of those things are a sign that this has run it’s course.
Your numbers ignore one fairly significant thing, COVID caused those deaths with a lockdown. So it would have been far worse if we lived life like do during a flu. This is not the flu.
since data is your tool...let's use your 2017 super flu data and suggest instead of 4800 people in New York, once they find a handful of them who are ill, and shove them into all the nursing homes...how does the data spin? Do we see a dramatic increase in death by purposely/indirectly infecting the most vulnerable clients? YOU are the ones who once stated you cannot compare it to the flu...ok, I agree. The circumstances and handling were VERY different.
since data is your tool...let's use your 2017 super flu data and suggest instead of 4800 people in New York, once they find a handful of them who are ill, and shove them into all the nursing homes...how does the data spin? Do we see a dramatic increase in death by purposely/indirectly infecting the most vulnerable clients? YOU are the ones who once stated you cannot compare it to the flu...ok, I agree. The circumstances and handling were VERY different.
great thoughtful question as always XM. Personally, I don't see it reducing sports participation on the grand scale. What MAY happen short term...all of the summer league, travel craziness that has blown up the last decade or so may take a step back? Maybe just maybe kids go back to playing in their own neighborhoods for a little bit. It's ironic, that's what we did as kids...and in our neighborhood alone we had several D1 athletes and a few smaller program athletes in baseball, football, golf, I was a track guy...we just did different stuff all day every day all summer long. We were well rounded, we developed game savvy, we trained because we loved it. Not because some coach was making rosters for a tourney in Texas this weekend.
Personally, I also see college sports returning to normalcy and thriving in the next couple of years. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed millions...and two years later we gave way to the roaring 20s...I do think some fringe schools will lose a lot of minor men's sports as we already saw at a few programs when this started. Finances will be a major issue. I assume at some point it may restore itself. It's a wild world ahead.
The CFL is in dire straights. Unlike the NFL, ticket sales are the primary revenue source vs tv/broadcast money. Where’s the cash coming from without a full stadium??? You don’t find it on every street like hockey. As a result, the league sits very low on the totem pole of importance. The problem with the CFL is not the product... it’s the decades of inept management and evidence is sparse regarding the ability to navigate a solution. The current inarticulate commissioner recently asked for a bailout and was told to pound sand. The Canadian governments attitude at the hearing essentially was money for nothing. It’s a struggle to see this ending well.... nothing but storm clouds in every direction.
I'm a millennial and I know a small handful of people my age who have interest in baseball. If I was an owner, I'd have sold my team yesterday. That's a dying game.
Maybe take a poll of baseball's popularity among the growing Latin American population before you sell your team.
Not sure why you are being negged other than people just can’t bear the thought of life without sports, but this is a fair topic for discussion.
*negging is forming up. You neg therefore you belong. It's a power thing here
Common sense will prevail. Life will get back to normal.
It did after Swine Flu.
It did after Bird Flue.
It did after Spanish Flu.
It did after the automobile was invented (annual car deaths and annual Covid-19 deaths are trending to be the same order of magnitude).
It did after every other disease to ever hit the Earth.
Why in the world would things stay permanently like this for Covid-19?
All true, but every time there is a recession (or worse) like there is now the sands shift, with sports as with many other things.
There were about 36,000 traffic fatalities in the US last year. There have been about 115,000 covid deaths so far this year. And the automobile changed the world pretty dramatically.