My daughter asked me yesterday if there will ever be sports again?
I told her I thought so. I wish I could have given her a more definitive answer.
Perhaps to the detriment of my mental health, I continue to read everything I can about the COVID epidemic. I am pretty much resigned to the fact that COVID is going to be significantly with us for at least the next two years, and even longer if we don’t develop a vaccine, which is not sure thing.
Coronavirus: Top scientist who battled COVID-19 says we will never live normally without vaccine
While the social distancing and shutdowns have succeeded in flattening the curve, COVID remains out there waiting to rekindle its flame. As states reopen and the number of cases and deaths again rise, how will we respond?
I have seen both the deaths that COVID has wrought and I have seen the despair and fear that the lockdowns bring, despair and fear that can also be lethal.
The articles below are thoughtful discussions of the tradeoffs between keeping the economy closed and opening it up.
Take the Shutdown Skeptics Seriously from the Atlantic.
Set aside “flattening the curve,” which will continue to make sense. Are ongoing, onerous shutdowns warranted beyond what is necessary to avoid overwhelming ambulances, hospitals, and morgues? The answer depends in part on an unknown: how close the country is to containing the virus.
... But the warnings of thoughtful shutdown skeptics warrant careful study, not stigma rooted in the false pretense that they don’t have any plausible concerns or value human life.
Economic Costs Are Human Costs from ARC.
We are being told we can’t fight the virus without pausing the economy, yet we can’t fight the virus without the economy.
We Can't Ignore the Harms of Social Distancing-commentary from Medscape
The author argues that economic losses as well as people’s fears of going to the hospital are killing people, and this needs to be factored into our response to COVID-19.
SARS-CoV-2 will spread, and it will kill people. But so will our interventions.... Less restrictive policies combined with attentive public health surveillance do not equate to the idea of sacrificing the vulnerable. Rather, they attempt to balance the nondichotomous continuous nature of both COVID and non-COVID mortality....COVID-19 is only one cause of death; there will be many more non-COVID deaths over the next 2 years. That is why the endpoint of this experiment is not this summer or next summer, but possibly the summer after that. And at that endpoint, we mustn't count only COVID-19 deaths but all deaths.
And finally, this blog post, The Risks-Know Them-Avoid Them. The post, which has already had over 1.6 million views, clearly explains the most likely ways and places where people get COVID. It offers some hope for outdoor sports, but makes me think basketball season is a long way off.
The reason to highlight these different outbreaks is to show you the commonality of outbreaks of COVID-19. All these infection events were indoors, with people closely-spaced, with lots of talking, singing, or yelling. The main sources for infection are home, workplace, public transport, social gatherings, and restaurants. This accounts for 90% of all transmission events. In contrast, outbreaks spread from shopping appear to be responsible for a small percentage of traced infections....Importantly, of the countries performing contact tracing properly, only a single outbreak has been reported from an outdoor environment (less than 0.3% of traced infections).
