2019-20 Offseason Thread

[Schad]

I doubt it's that quickly. It's going to ultimately look more like a waveform than a single peak...we'll relax restrictions a bit at a time (in maybe a month, maybe more) once we have enough resources on-line, and that will lead to another peak, and if that looks like it might break containment, the restrictions will be reintroduced. That pattern will probably continue for a fair while.

Max lag time might be 7 days, but that's not the max amount of time to be symptomatic, especially with younger individuals. I'd imagine that a fair number of those currently on quarantine will present with symptoms and the numbers will climb again. Hopefully, it'll be temporary.

[BigLeagueChew]

Perhaps a look at the city level would give people a different perspective.



Italy is still trying to get people to stay at home on day 25.

[BigLeagueChew]

Perhaps a look at overall deaths at the city level would give people a different perspective.



Italy is still trying to get people to stay at home on day 25. New York will need help.

[Schad]

And to put in perspective what those graphs mean in practical terms: Madrid has already vastly exceeded their mortuary capacity. They are using a large ice skating rink as a morgue for the time being, though with the understanding that it will fill up quickly and they will need to find other places to store bodies in pretty short order.

[BigLeagueChew]

And to put in perspective what those graphs mean in practical terms: Madrid has already vastly exceeded their mortuary capacity. They are using a large ice skating rink as a morgue for the time being, though with the understanding that it will fill up quickly and they will need to find other places to store bodies in pretty short order.

Yeah we cannot build something like that in a week like china did. I kind of wonder why they can't* contain things at a state or provincial level then allow people in afterwards to help them(doctors or setup volunteers and so on)

[Tanner]

Trump is targeting Easter to ease the restrictions. If that holds up then baseball in mid May is doable (3-4 weeks for spring training). That seems aggressive though and a lot would have to go right.

[Schad]

It's not aggressive, it's laughable. There's absolutely no chance of this being under control by Easter. There's absolutely no chance of us even approaching an inflection point by Easter with the strictest possible measures in place tomorrow. He picked a date because it seemed like a good idea at the time to him, and now he's committing to it, because he doesn't know how anything works.

[BigLeagueChew]

The key to effective social distancing, though, is timing.

“I think the critical lesson from both the modeling and the historical work is that the benefits of multiple interventions are greatest if they are introduced early (before 1% of the population is infected) and maintained,” wrote Hatchett, who has also directed medical preparedness in the Obama White House. Distancing measures are less effective once more people have contracted the virus, especially in cases where the vast majority of people are not sick enough to need medical attention.

https://qz.com/1816060/a-chart-of-the-1918-spanish-flu-shows-why-social-distancing-works/

---

Another point worth emphasizing from the research: Social distancing practices have to be sustained. As obstructive as it is that we might need to do some social distancing for months, that really might be what’s necessary to save as many lives as possible.

Markel’s study demonstrates this: As the pandemic appeared to subside, St. Louis pulled back its social distancing measures. But it turned out that the pullback was premature — and flu deaths started to rise once again. This graph shows that, with the line chart tracking flu deaths over time and the black and gray bars below showing when key social distancing measures were in place:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/24/21188121/coronavirus-covid-19-social-distancing-1918-spanish-flu

*Not showing the graph to display how long it might take us, since it's a different virus and numbers involved. It also takes sustained effort after the inflection point and not too early.

[The_Hater]

Trump is targeting Easter to ease the restrictions. If that holds up then baseball in mid May is doable (3-4 weeks for spring training). That seems aggressive though and a lot would have to go right.

It’s not realistic imo. Individual states will all have different restrictions, not to mention Ontario, and MLB isn’t going to listen to trump and put fans at risk either.

The pandemic itself will be the determining factor, not a crazy president who is ignoring most of the advice from the professionals.

If anything, Trump’s actions here are going to delay the return of sports by months because the pandemic is going to grown exponentially

[Wo1verine]

Man at this pace with regards to America, we'd be lucky to see sports this year for crying out loud!

20,000 infected just yesterday alone and only going to get worse before it gets better!

It's depressing not being able to watch sports during a time of crisis ..

[Skin Blues]

Man at this pace with regards to America, we'd be lucky to see sports this year for crying out loud!

20,000 infected just yesterday alone and only going to get worse before it gets better!

It's depressing not being able to watch sports during a time of crisis ..

Well, if you look at the "flatten the curve" charts, getting worse really fast means it's over quicker. Just have to hope enough players survive to play the season!

[Schad]

Can't wait for present/future lung function to get graded on the 20-80 scale.

[wamco]

Too soon

[Black Watch]

Not quite. At some point there will be herd immunity.

I'm not saying they should do that, but that's idea Trump is flirting with right now. It will mean many, many deaths, however. He is so clearly looking at how this all affects his re-election campaign, instead of looking at how to save innocent lives. It's a reflection of his narcissism, and it's an absolute disaster about to get even worse.

In general, you're talking 70%+ of the population having gotten it for functional herd immunity. The more contagious the virus, the higher it gets. Polio's not exceptionally contagious; it's over 80%. Measles are exceptionally contagious; it's about 95%. I'd imagine you'd need 85-90% of the population exposed to COVID to get there.

Source: my younger sister spent a few months as an anti-vaxxer, and I got very familiar with the statistics and explaining the free rider problem while trying not to scream.

Measles has an R-nought of 15 (!) and Polio has an R-nought of 6... and COVID-19 has an R-nought of 2.2

Don't know what you mean by 'functional herd immunity' specifically, but if we could get herd immunity to 30-40% (and we'll know in a couple weeks when the antibody tests come online and we do random samples everywhere) that will be enough to keep the hospitals from overflowing and allow us to stagger the easing of the quarantine more quickly.

But for this to really all be over it will take herd immunity in the 80% range, for sure.

[Schad]

Measles has an R-nought of 15 (!) and Polio has an R-nought of 6... and COVID-19 has an R-nought of 2.2

Don't know what you mean by 'functional herd immunity' specifically, but if we could get herd immunity to 30-40% (and we'll know in a couple weeks when the antibody tests come online and we do random samples everywhere) that will be enough to keep the hospitals from overflowing and allow us to stagger the easing of the quarantine more quickly.

But for this to really all be over it will take herd immunity in the 80+% range, for sure.

R0 on COVID's still a bit up in the air...initial Imperial College estimate was 1.5 - 3.5, but their revised figures for # of cases in the general population suggest that it might be higher (or their revised figures for # of cases are wildly inaccurate; either seems possible to my statistics-but-not-medicine-knowing brain). Will definitely have a better idea once serology tests are widely deployed.

But yeah; you'd get a dramatic drop-off in the number of cases long before you reached the point where enough of the population had immunity to reliably contain outbreaks. It'd just be reeeeeeeeeally grisly getting there if it happened all at once.

[Black Watch]

R0 on COVID's still a bit up in the air...initial Imperial College estimate was 1.5 - 3.5, but their revised figures for # of cases in the general population suggest that it might be higher (or their revised figures for # of cases are wildly inaccurate; either seems possible to my statistics-but-not-medicine-knowing brain). Will definitely have a better idea once serology tests are widely deployed.

I used 2.2 as the average between 2 and 2.5, and so even if it is higher, it's still not as contagious as the other two you compared it to.

But yeah; you'd get a dramatic drop-off in the number of cases long before you reached the point where enough of the population had immunity to reliably contain outbreaks. It'd just be reeeeeeeeeally grisly getting there if it happened all at once.

I'm not advocating for all-at-once exposure in order to speed up herd immunity (you're still haunted by my old account and the OTB/CA trolling I used to do on there, aren't you )

We don't have the hospital beds, and it'd also just be completely immoral. There are exponentially more young people with asthma in this country than there are hospital beds; ditto for Holland or any other small country that thinks it can speed up herd immunity by encouraging young'ins to work and still frequent bars. It would be a massive amount of deaths, all at once, and so that's not an option.

But neither is staying inside. At the end of April they'll have to start with some pulsed easing of the quarantine—two weeks out, two weeks back in; repeat—because herd immunity is still the end goal.

[Schad]

Oh, I didn't think that you were advocating YOLOing this. But I think you're underestimating how long people will remain in quarantine before we can even consider relaxation. It'll definitely go in a bit of a wave -- relax, tighten, repeat -- for months, but so many parts of the US are so far behind the curve that I'd be surprised if they were in a position to do so before the start of June. The CDC's current estimates are that this won't peak until late April, and that's with the baked-in presumption that more will be done than currently is being done in a lot of places.

[BigLeagueChew]

Those charts shown today are alarming but they left out Quebec which has more deaths than Ontario and military has been called in. Also heard that China allowed people to attend movie theaters again, cases went back up and they've been re-closed.

[Black Watch]

Oh, I didn't think that you were advocating YOLOing this. But I think you're underestimating how long people will remain in quarantine before we can even consider relaxation. It'll definitely go in a bit of a wave -- relax, tighten, repeat -- for months, but so many parts of the US are so far behind the curve that I'd be surprised if they were in a position to do so before the start of June. The CDC's current estimates are that this won't peak until late April, and that's with the baked-in presumption that more will be done than currently is being done in a lot of places.

And I think you're underestimating the recent news of serology tests getting FDA approval.

See, molecular tests (PCR) are the ones we had first. These test for viral RNA and only detect during an active infection window of about a week or two. These tests require specialized equipment and so tend to be slow and capacity limited.

The new immunoassays are rapid, point-of-care tests, and can be mass-produced cheaply. They come in two types: antigen and antibody. Antigen ones detect for active infections only, and antibody ones detect past infections only (more-or-less).

The antibody immunoassays will be a gamechanger. They will let us find the true infection rate and the level of (potential) herd immunity.

[Schad]

It'll be a gamechanger...in time. None of the epidemiologists I'm following (and man, the moment where I swapped out all of my sports follows for public health officials was a bleak one) seem to believe that it'll allow for a rapid return to normalcy. In the short term, it'll allow them to figure out the statistical parameters of COVID, as you say, but unless it turns out that the number of people who have recovered vastly exceeds even optimistic projections, we're still looking at a pretty substantial period of trying to get this contained before we can think about something as trivial as sports.

Right now, one out of every 1082 people in the US has or had a confirmed infection. That's an alarming number, and it's generally assumed that the number of actual cases is quite a bit higher. But even if it's 20x higher, you'd still be looking at less than 2% of the population having contracted COVID...it would still need to get severalfold worse before approaching a peak, and the road to that peak would be extraordinarily rough.