Moderators: LyricalRico, nate33, montestewart
Amid widespread coronavirus concerns wreaking havoc on the league, the NBA and its players association reached an agreement on Tuesday requiring additional health and safety protocols for the current season.
nate33 wrote:Is it really spreading? I mean, are more actual NBA players actually testing positive? Or do we just have an increase in overly cautious quarantine actions because an NBA player happens to walk past another NBA player or coach who has tested positive but is totally asymptomatic?
Most of what we have been told is a lie. Asymptomatic spread of the virus is practically non-existent. Healthy people who feel well enough to play basketball are not spreaders. If you are not coughing and sneezing, you aren't spreading the virus. Most of our policies to fight the virus make no sense. There is virtually no correlation between the restrictiveness of a jurisdiction's lockdown policy and the propagation of the virus. Most of these NBA policies also make no sense.
Heck, has a single NBA player even been hospitalized? Is there any data that shows the NBA players are contracting the virus at a greater rate than regular people who mostly stay at home?
nate33 wrote:Is it really spreading? I mean, are more actual NBA players actually testing positive? Or do we just have an increase in overly cautious quarantine actions because an NBA player happens to walk past another NBA player or coach who has tested positive but is totally asymptomatic?
Most of what we have been told is a lie. Asymptomatic spread of the virus is practically non-existent. Healthy people who feel well enough to play basketball are not spreaders. If you are not coughing and sneezing, you aren't spreading the virus. Most of our policies to fight the virus make no sense. There is virtually no correlation between the restrictiveness of a jurisdiction's lockdown policy and the propagation of the virus. Most of these NBA policies also make no sense.
Heck, has a single NBA player even been hospitalized? Is there any data that shows the NBA players are contracting the virus at a greater rate than regular people who mostly stay at home?
nate33 wrote:I mean, are more actual NBA players actually testing positive? Or do we just have an increase in overly cautious quarantine actions because an NBA player happens to walk past another NBA player or coach who has tested positive but is totally asymptomatic?
Most of what we have been told is a lie. Asymptomatic spread of the virus is practically non-existent.
Results
Under baseline assumptions, approximately 59% of all transmission came from asymptomatic transmission: 35% from presymptomatic individuals and 24% from individuals who are never symptomatic (Figure 1). Because each component is uncertain, we assessed different timings of peak infectiousness relative to illness onset and different proportions of transmission from individuals who never have symptoms. Maintaining the 24% of transmission from individuals who never have symptoms, but shifting peak infectiousness 1 day earlier (to day 4) increased presymptomatic transmission to 43% and all asymptomatic transmission to 67% (Figure 1A). A later peak (ie, day 6) decreased presymptomatic to 27% and all asymptomatic transmission to 51% (Figure 1C).
doclinkin wrote:nate33 wrote:I mean, are more actual NBA players actually testing positive? Or do we just have an increase in overly cautious quarantine actions because an NBA player happens to walk past another NBA player or coach who has tested positive but is totally asymptomatic?
Most of what we have been told is a lie. Asymptomatic spread of the virus is practically non-existent.
Journal of American Medical Association says wrong. Almost 60% of infections are caused by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic infections. 1 in 4 from people who never develop symptoms at all.
We are in a surge. Bad information spreads faster than infections.Results
Under baseline assumptions, approximately 59% of all transmission came from asymptomatic transmission: 35% from presymptomatic individuals and 24% from individuals who are never symptomatic (Figure 1). Because each component is uncertain, we assessed different timings of peak infectiousness relative to illness onset and different proportions of transmission from individuals who never have symptoms. Maintaining the 24% of transmission from individuals who never have symptoms, but shifting peak infectiousness 1 day earlier (to day 4) increased presymptomatic transmission to 43% and all asymptomatic transmission to 67% (Figure 1A). A later peak (ie, day 6) decreased presymptomatic to 27% and all asymptomatic transmission to 51% (Figure 1C).
Those two factors are what make this virus more virulent: a) it spreads asymptomatically more easily than flu and other viruses, and many who are otherwise healthy don't know that they are carriers. Normally if you are sick you stay home in bed moaning. Here, you may be at a strip club or be invited up to the room of an NBA player to hang out for a while... And b) information about the pandemic has become politicized, so people have difficulty distinguishing what risk factors are worth facing or what preventative measures are sensible.
I have no doubt many NBA players (who have peak fitness and no comorbid complications) would be able to play multiple games even with symptomatic COVID. Doesn't mean they wouldn't be infectious and manage to kill their coach.
nate33 wrote:Basically, the only mitigation measure that seems to help is closed borders and isolation. Places like New Zealand that closed their borders before the infection became widespread have managed to shut it out completely. Every other western nation has had no success. Countries that were successful early, like those in Eastern Europe, merely had a surge later on. Virus gonna virus.
I'll wait until experts more knowledgeable than me critique it
doclinkin wrote:nate33 wrote:Basically, the only mitigation measure that seems to help is closed borders and isolation. Places like New Zealand that closed their borders before the infection became widespread have managed to shut it out completely. Every other western nation has had no success. Countries that were successful early, like those in Eastern Europe, merely had a surge later on. Virus gonna virus.
Germany did great with lockdown and contact tracing, then as with much of Europe they opened up to 'lockdown lite' and saw a surge.
Ok, I read the article by libertarian 'independent journalist' Jeremy Hammond. And it does not contradict the January 7th scientific study I cite, but underscores what I said. Here the author nitpicks between whether PRE-symptomatic and A-symptomatic carriers are in fact driving the infection. It is a distinction without a difference. In both cases the carrier likely has no idea that they are spreading the infection. The studies do show that both can spread the infection. They are mobile, interacting with folks, and active during that time. The study I cited (again as of less than a week ago) suggests whether or not they develop symptoms later, people who have it and do not have symptoms can be infectious, to a rate of 60%. That's not zero.
None of that backs up your assertion that 'most of what we have been told is a lie'. Fair to back off to a position that says
I'll wait until experts more knowledgeable than me critique it
But when it comes to a disease that has killed over 380K Americans, to err on the side of caution is only sensible. Put it this way: our population is 328 million. Over one in every thousand Americans has now died from COVID in the past year.
Or more locally: Would you attend a Wizards home game (20,000 fans) knowing that on your way out the door a death squad would randomly pick 20 people to execute?
Researchers in Wuhan did a city-wide screening between May 14 and June 1 using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assays to detect viral RNA in residents. Among eligible residents, which was those aged six years or older, 92.9 percent participated, which amounted to 9,899,828 people.
With this intensive screening program, they identified no new COVID-19 cases. Yet there were positive test results for 300 individuals who were asymptomatic. Among these, 63 percent also tested positive for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, offering additional evidence that they had indeed been infected.
The researchers also tried to culture virus from asymptomatic individuals who tested positive, but the results indicated that there was “no ‘viable virus’ in positive cases detected in this study”. Consequently, despite testing positive for viral RNA, none of these individuals appeared capable of transmitting the virus to others.
As the authors stated, “there was no evidence of transmission from asymptomatic positive persons to traced close contacts.” The asymptomatic individuals who tested positive “were unlikely to be infectious.”
I mentioned how the WHO’s June 5 guidance on mask use noted that asymptomatic individuals are less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms. That document was updated again on December 1 (archived here). It now states that studies have estimated that around 20 percent of people who become infected never develop disease symptoms. Asymptomatic transmission “can occur”, but studies continue to suggest that “asymptomatically infected individuals are less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms.”
That review expressed the role of each type of transmission in terms of the “secondary attack rate”, which they defined as “the number of new SARS-CoV-2 infection cases among susceptible contacts of primary cases divided by the total number of susceptible contacts.”
The review also uses the term “asymptomatic case”. Keep in mind that this means a person who received a positive PCR test but never developed COVID-19.
Three studies following up on 17, 91, and 455 close contacts of asymptomatic cases, respectively, found no evidence for asymptomatic transmission—an attack rate of “0%”.
A fourth study following up on 305 contacts of 8 asymptomatic cases identified one secondary case, for an attack rate of “0.3%”.
A fifth study following up on 119 contacts of 12 asymptomatic cases likewise identified one secondary case, for an attack rate of “0.8%”. That study also showed that “close contacts that lived with an index case had 12 times the risk of infection as those who did not live with the index case”.
In other words, asymptomatic transmission, when it does occur, appears much more likely to occur in households rather than public settings—which has great relevance for circumstances in which adults are being ordered to stay at home from jobs and children are kept home from schools by government policymakers.
FAH1223 wrote:Too much money is at stake. If NBA didn't come back at Christmas, the league would have lost $600M according to Stephen A. Smith.
closg00 wrote:6 Wizard players have tested positive
WallToWall wrote:As of yesterday, 19 games have been postponed. Given the rates in the spread, I would suggest a 1 week stop and then a restart, along with the other measures taking place. This will help to identify any others infected, while limiting the possibility of additional spread.
