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Post by badgerbreath on Aug 13, 2020 22:51:30 GMT -5
I have no idea what you are talking about with NY or what data would suffice for you. All I know it that the number of infections, death rates, and positivity rates are way down from April. Those reductions came pursuant to actions. The vast majority of people in the stores I go to on LI still wear masks - maybe not well, but they wear them. In the city you are expected to wear them on the street. T here is plenty of data saying that masks reduce transmission (I only cite one of dozens of studies on the issue). I don't care if that data is specific to NY or not. The virus is the basically same bug. I (and many others) don't consider Sweden a success story. It has among the highest fatality rates per capita in Europe, certainly higher than other scandavian countries that took a completely different tack. It is nowhere near herd immunity. It's still not clear if there has been any economic benefit overall from Sweden's approach. That awaits a longer term view than we have now. There is certainly some fine tuning about responses to COVID that we need to learn. Some actions probably had bigger effects than others. There is a lot to learn about the effects of the disease, both health wise and economically. But herd immunity implies huge loss of life. Given a R0 of 2 (which is on the low end), herd immunity would only set in if 67% of the population was infected - assuming no other mitigating actions. Some localities are close to that, the vast majority aren't. Even at the lowest IFR estimates (0.5%, lower than CDC at 0.65%), that would mean 1.1 million dead. Even if you reached herd immunity at 50%, you are at 825k. That would be 1 of every 400 people. We're at one in 2000 now. Probably more. To bring this back to sports - if we had a larger coordinated plan, we could endure a short term economic cost and get to a situation that would allow them without risking such a cost to lives, which will always trump economics. And I would have my volleyball season this Fall. Maybe we could even have football. But we keep trying to thread some needle between the value of life and economic constancy while blind. That sweater won't knit. We agree that all of the NY covid data points are much much better. They have very little covid. You say that is because of actions. The problem with that theory is that all of the data measuring actions suggest NY isn't really doing anything different from say CA. The NYT had survey data on mask wearing and NYC was no higher than LA as an example. If you look at data on mobile phone movements the data went down about the same amount in NYC and LA. If you look at how many card present transaction are happening at restaurants and similar establishments they went down about the same amount. Literally any data point you choose NYC is doing no better than LA. And yet LA just had a big spike in cases and NY is down to very little. Why is that? Please find my any data point that shows how NYC did a better job in social distancing than LA. There isn't one. Similarly, Sweden is down to ~3 deaths a day and currently has fewer covid deaths per capita than NY. How did they do it? They haven't done any of the things that you claim have helped NY conquer covid. Maybe, just maybe, you have it wrong. Very happy to talk about the herd immunity math. Here we go.... You are right that you start with R0. You are also right that R0 without mitigation is probably over 2. Very hard to measure. But with some simple mitigation measures R0 quickly gets much smaller than that. FL, who is lead by a Republican, Trump loving and clearly stupid governor, never really had an R0 over 1.4 in their second wave. If you assume an R0 of 1.4 then you need 30% infection to get to herd immunity. 1.4*(1-.3)=.98. However, it looks like some people are immune to this disease. Corona viruses have been around for a while and it looks like at least some of them have left people immune to Covid-19. The math gets more complex here because the RO of 1.4 includes the immune. But if assume that say 50% of people are immune, then a 15% infection rate would reduce the number of people that can actually catch the disease by 30% and would reach herd immunity. So: 1.4*(1/.5)-.15)=.98. There is one more big issue. All of these calcs essentially assume that all people are equally socially active. That almost certainly is not the case. So as the most socially active people contact the disease (likely 20-25 year olds) they are going to be the first to get immune and their immunity will have a bigger impact on the R0 because they are the most active vectors of spread. The math here gets very complicated butbut it clearly lowers the level to reach herd immunity and potentially by a lot. Now all of the numbers I quoted above are approximations that you can argue with. And we don't really have very good estimates for frankly any of the them. What we do know is that the place that have been hit the hardest now have very little of the disease. This includes a country like Sweden that has done almost nothing to suppress the disease. The smartest data people are starting to settle around the herd immunity hypothesis. Just to be clear, given the difficult math above the level of herd immunity in various places could be fairly different. The level of herd immunity will also change depending upon what mitigation measures you use and as you open up the mitigation does down, R0 goes up and you need a higher level to hit herd immunity. If you are interested I would point you to Youyang Gu who developed covidprojections.com and posts some very interesting stuff on Twitter.... "The smartest data people are starting to settle around the herd immunity hypothesis." There are any number of reasons for the observations you've seen. Rt can vary due to environmental conditions including weather, sun exposure, temperature, air flow, and, yes, behavior. Are we really presuming that transmission is the same in winter and summer? Moreover, with respect to the behavior, let me give you a scicomm hint: as soon as you tell people that you are near herd immunity, people will stop doing those behaviors that moderate exposure and are inconvenient. Then your Rt changes, and your predictions change. We may be seeing that in live time with these debates about the college season. That's a problem because your argument could be built cleverly on a house of cards. People in NY may be using credit cards more in restaurants in NYC in July/August, for example, but literally all of those restaurants now serve outdoors, by decree. I deliberately went out of my way to spend money on takeout to support my local establishments here on LI after they reopened. You wouldn't know the difference because the card is swiped in the same place. I didn't shop for weeks but now I do, because I have to eat, except I have to wait 20-30 minutes every weekend to get into my Trader Joe's. They stagger the admissions to keep density to a particular level. I get food at the same rate, but the situation is totally different. I also pick my spots to but stuff. I go to home improvement places precisely because they are huge and because what I get there for gardening and home improvement doesn't force me to contact other people much. Does everyone do this? Do such things happen in Florida? Do you know? And are you accounting for levels of community infection at the same time we're dealing with these differences? Because those things should interact and are therefore very hard to estimate accurately given so few degrees of freedom. Here is yet another. We know that people on average are wearing masks, but a big problem is association. Do mask wearers associate with other mask wearers or intermix randomly? Densities of non-mask wearers are what should affect efficiency of spread and likelihood of superspreader events, and wider spread. Average numbers not so much. Also, do people tell the truth when asked? What do interviewees assume about interviewers? How does that differ depending on where you are? The survey and credit card use measures are available, but I'd argue that they may not be very sensitive and could be biased and incomplete. Have they run the sensitivity analyses to find out if they capture relevant behavior at the right scale? Are surveys controlled? Remember, we are talking about 6' (2m) diameters of influence. Do you have that resolution? Do you even know? Moreover, your conclusions run straight against what we know from epidemiological evidence on masks, and on serological evidence about exposure and immunity which indicate far less than 20% exposure in most of these states - even in NYS. Locally it can be much much higher, and that may be part of the issue. In the process, you have to invent new reasons for immunity that no one knows about to explain those conflicting data. Sure there is some immune cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses, but that cross reactivity doesn't prevent more closely related mutant strains from causing the cold every year. Why and how would it affect a much more distantly related Coronavirus? Any clue? That's reaching for straws. My brother is a Dean who studies immunology of viral infections, including coronaviruses during his PhD, and he doesn't even know why this would work! Great for you if you can prove this hypothesis. That's a Science/Nature paper right there! TRY TO GET IT THROUGH PEER REVIEW rather than blogs. I won't listen to Galileo arguments. I've had two decades of them and I'm tired. Here is my worry. The disease may have burned through through those communities that are tightly connected and now it's smoldering through less connected ones. What I feared at the beginning of the summer - Blue will tell you - is that people would suddenly think a new normal had set in and let the virus just sizzle through the country over summer and they would forget the lessons of NYC. And sure enough that is exactly what has happened. Now I worry that we think we know Rt when it's not a fixed number and very well may change in Fall. We thought we had a seasonal disease, then it ripped through summer and through tropical countries, and we thought... maybe not? But it could easily end up being worse this winter with relatively subtle changes in conditions and changes in behavior driven by just such talk. A lot worse. Do I know? No. Does anyone? Probably not. That includes you and all of the other "smartest" people. You are looking at phenomenological evidence that only indirectly relates to the things you actually want to measure, and may be undercut by countervailing trends that you can't measure, at scales that are unmeasureable, and runs opposite to other epidemiological evidence and what we know about immunology. Welcome to epidemiology! It's a very vocal minority who believe the herd immunity hypothesis, yet you presume they are the "smartest" people. Why? The story is a convenient one, for different reasons for different people. But it's one that elevates some types of evidence over other types. The big problem of science is finding a theory that generates consilience among data, not that discredits some types of evidence in favor of others. This is a bigger example of the small disagreement I had with Blue over Minnesota's 2018 B1G run. By the stats as Blue had them, they were only marginally better than everyone else in the B1G. But anyone watching the matches in conference would know different. They wiped the floor with the rest of the conference, and then shined their shoes. Other than a relaxation at the end when they had the conference sewn up, it really wasn't that close. I really appreciate Blues efforts, but Blue provides only one kind of data. OK. I'll shut up now. Oh man, I didn't even get to Sweden. Oh well. Sweden in fact did make changes. There is debate about the causes of the decline, but that debate is real, and there is still no strong evidence of a economic upside. There won't truly be for a year.
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Post by bigjohn043 on Aug 14, 2020 6:58:38 GMT -5
We agree that all of the NY covid data points are much much better. They have very little covid. You say that is because of actions. The problem with that theory is that all of the data measuring actions suggest NY isn't really doing anything different from say CA. The NYT had survey data on mask wearing and NYC was no higher than LA as an example. If you look at data on mobile phone movements the data went down about the same amount in NYC and LA. If you look at how many card present transaction are happening at restaurants and similar establishments they went down about the same amount. Literally any data point you choose NYC is doing no better than LA. And yet LA just had a big spike in cases and NY is down to very little. Why is that? Please find my any data point that shows how NYC did a better job in social distancing than LA. There isn't one. Similarly, Sweden is down to ~3 deaths a day and currently has fewer covid deaths per capita than NY. How did they do it? They haven't done any of the things that you claim have helped NY conquer covid. Maybe, just maybe, you have it wrong. Very happy to talk about the herd immunity math. Here we go.... You are right that you start with R0. You are also right that R0 without mitigation is probably over 2. Very hard to measure. But with some simple mitigation measures R0 quickly gets much smaller than that. FL, who is lead by a Republican, Trump loving and clearly stupid governor, never really had an R0 over 1.4 in their second wave. If you assume an R0 of 1.4 then you need 30% infection to get to herd immunity. 1.4*(1-.3)=.98. However, it looks like some people are immune to this disease. Corona viruses have been around for a while and it looks like at least some of them have left people immune to Covid-19. The math gets more complex here because the RO of 1.4 includes the immune. But if assume that say 50% of people are immune, then a 15% infection rate would reduce the number of people that can actually catch the disease by 30% and would reach herd immunity. So: 1.4*(1/.5)-.15)=.98. There is one more big issue. All of these calcs essentially assume that all people are equally socially active. That almost certainly is not the case. So as the most socially active people contact the disease (likely 20-25 year olds) they are going to be the first to get immune and their immunity will have a bigger impact on the R0 because they are the most active vectors of spread. The math here gets very complicated butbut it clearly lowers the level to reach herd immunity and potentially by a lot. Now all of the numbers I quoted above are approximations that you can argue with. And we don't really have very good estimates for frankly any of the them. What we do know is that the place that have been hit the hardest now have very little of the disease. This includes a country like Sweden that has done almost nothing to suppress the disease. The smartest data people are starting to settle around the herd immunity hypothesis. Just to be clear, given the difficult math above the level of herd immunity in various places could be fairly different. The level of herd immunity will also change depending upon what mitigation measures you use and as you open up the mitigation does down, R0 goes up and you need a higher level to hit herd immunity. If you are interested I would point you to Youyang Gu who developed covidprojections.com and posts some very interesting stuff on Twitter.... "The smartest data people are starting to settle around the herd immunity hypothesis." There are any number of reasons for the observations you've seen. Rt can vary due to environmental conditions including weather, sun exposure, temperature, air flow, and, yes, behavior. Are we really presuming that transmission is the same in winter and summer? Moreover, with respect to the behavior, let me give you a scicomm hint: as soon as you tell people that you are near herd immunity, people will stop doing those behaviors that moderate exposure and are inconvenient. Then your Rt changes, and your predictions change. We may be seeing that in live time with these debates about the college season. That's a problem because your argument could be built cleverly on a house of cards. People in NY may be using credit cards more in restaurants in NYC in July/August, for example, but literally all of those restaurants now serve outdoors, by decree. I deliberately went out of my way to spend money on takeout to support my local establishments here on LI after they reopened. You wouldn't know the difference because the card is swiped in the same place. I didn't shop for weeks but now I do, because I have to eat, except I have to wait 20-30 minutes every weekend to get into my Trader Joe's. They stagger the admissions to keep density to a particular level. I get food at the same rate, but the situation is totally different. I also pick my spots to but stuff. I go to home improvement places precisely because they are huge and because what I get there for gardening and home improvement doesn't force me to contact other people much. Does everyone do this? Do such things happen in Florida? Do you know? And are you accounting for levels of community infection at the same time we're dealing with these differences? Because those things should interact and are therefore very hard to estimate accurately given so few degrees of freedom. Here is yet another. We know that people on average are wearing masks, but a big problem is association. Do mask wearers associate with other mask wearers or intermix randomly? Densities of non-mask wearers are what should affect efficiency of spread and likelihood of superspreader events, and wider spread. Average numbers not so much. Also, do people tell the truth when asked? What do interviewees assume about interviewers? How does that differ depending on where you are? The survey and credit card use measures are available, but I'd argue that they may not be very sensitive and could be biased and incomplete. Have they run the sensitivity analyses to find out if they capture relevant behavior at the right scale? Are surveys controlled? Remember, we are talking about 6' (2m) diameters of influence. Do you have that resolution? Do you even know? Moreover, your conclusions run straight against what we know from epidemiological evidence on masks, and on serological evidence about exposure and immunity which indicate far less than 20% exposure in most of these states - even in NYS. Locally it can be much much higher, and that may be part of the issue. In the process, you have to invent new reasons for immunity that no one knows about to explain those conflicting data. Sure there is some immune cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses, but that cross reactivity doesn't prevent more closely related mutant strains from causing the cold every year. Why and how would it affect a much more distantly related Coronavirus? Any clue? That's reaching for straws. My brother is a Dean who studies immunology of viral infections, including coronaviruses during his PhD, and he doesn't even know why this would work! Great for you if you can prove this hypothesis. That's a Science/Nature paper right there! TRY TO GET IT THROUGH PEER REVIEW rather than blogs. I won't listen to Galileo arguments. I've had two decades of them and I'm tired. Here is my worry. The disease may have burned through through those communities that are tightly connected and now it's smoldering through less connected ones. What I feared at the beginning of the summer - Blue will tell you - is that people would suddenly think a new normal had set in and let the virus just sizzle through the country over summer and they would forget the lessons of NYC. And sure enough that is exactly what has happened. Now I worry that we think we know Rt when it's not a fixed number and very well may change in Fall. We thought we had a seasonal disease, then it ripped through summer and through tropical countries, and we thought... maybe not? But it could easily end up being worse this winter with relatively subtle changes in conditions and changes in behavior driven by just such talk. A lot worse. Do I know? No. Does anyone? Probably not. That includes you and all of the other "smartest" people. You are looking at phenomenological evidence that only indirectly relates to the things you actually want to measure, and may be undercut by countervailing trends that you can't measure, at scales that are unmeasureable, and runs opposite to other epidemiological evidence and what we know about immunology. Welcome to epidemiology! It's a very vocal minority who believe the herd immunity hypothesis, yet you presume they are the "smartest" people. Why? The story is a convenient one, for different reasons for different people. But it's one that elevates some types of evidence over other types. The big problem of science is finding a theory that generates consilience among data, not that discredits some types of evidence in favor of others. This is a bigger example of the small disagreement I had with Blue over Minnesota's 2018 B1G run. By the stats as Blue had them, they were only marginally better than everyone else in the B1G. But anyone watching the matches in conference would know different. They wiped the floor with the rest of the conference, and then shined their shoes. Other than a relaxation at the end when they had the conference sewn up, it really wasn't that close. I really appreciate Blues efforts, but Blue provides only one kind of data. OK. I'll shut up now. Oh man, I didn't even get to Sweden. Oh well. Sweden in fact did make changes. There is debate about the causes of the decline, but that debate is real, and there is still no strong evidence of a economic upside. There won't truly be for a year. Thank you for your thoughtful response. Let me start with were we agree. R0 can clearly be driven by both the environment and levels of mitigation. Completely agree with you there. You write: "Here is my worry. The disease may have burned through through those communities that are tightly connected and now it's smoldering through less connected ones." This is exactly right. When you say burned through you are describing herd immunity exactly. And the idea it will be reached first in communities with lots of social vectors is exactly right. And the idea that it is still smoldering is exactly right. Your worry is exactly what the best data (IMO) suggests. I also totally agree with you that we don't know yet. It is too early. We don't know what is going to happen. Lots of things can change that should and will effect the analysis. I disagree very strongly with the idea that NYC is doing anything different in mitigation measures that as an example LA. You make excuses and tell stories about why the data might not show this, but the reality is we have a ton of data and none of it shows real differences. If you are really going to claim NY did anything different than LA you have to show some form of something rather than just "I know what NY did". The problem with that is you are in NY and have literally no way to compare it to what LA did. FWIW, covidprojections.com thinks that the US has had 13.7% infection and NYS over 20%. They might wrong but just to give you a sense of what some of the leading analysts believe. And with respect, I believe the data currently best fits with the herd immunity hypothesis or your "worry" above. The fact that we shouldn't say this because people will let down their guard and the disease will come back stronger is really about communications and not the reality of the situation. Thank you for a respectful discussion.
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Post by gibbyb1 on Aug 14, 2020 11:03:01 GMT -5
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bluepenquin
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Posts: 12,904
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Post by bluepenquin on Aug 14, 2020 15:30:54 GMT -5
Thanks to badgerbreath and bigjohn043 for their thoughtful discussion the last couple days. I enjoyed reading.
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Post by missunderstood on Aug 15, 2020 19:37:34 GMT -5
Hi my babies... mama is back... I was put in the naughty cage for a few days....
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Post by Wiswell on Aug 15, 2020 20:40:46 GMT -5
Badger breath is an actual scientist. Not an "internet" scientist. There is a difference.
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Post by jgoodson on Aug 15, 2020 20:47:05 GMT -5
Welcome back Missunderstood,
I enjoy your comments. To paraphrase an old song-I’m just a soul whose intentions are good, Oh Lord, it’s me- Missunderstood. To those that think differently, they must be the animals:)
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Post by dodger on Aug 15, 2020 21:22:45 GMT -5
Badger breath is An “actual scientist”!? What kind of actual scientist? Christian scientist”
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Post by missunderstood on Aug 15, 2020 22:19:15 GMT -5
I have been so bummed the last week with the fact there will be no VB.... I was really was hoping to see Badgers run the table..
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Post by Riviera Minestrone on Aug 15, 2020 22:24:18 GMT -5
I have been so bummed the last week with the fact there will be no VB.... I was really was hoping to see Badgers run the table.. They were (are still in '21?) my odds-on favorite to win in 2020: No 2020 WVB no mo'; at least any version of it that will culminate in an NCAA championship for any program!
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Post by jgoodson on Aug 16, 2020 1:27:14 GMT -5
This is an excerpt from a story dated August 10, 2020 from Stat News. I do not know the experts consulted by the Big Ten. One epidemiological expert from the University of Minnesota is Dr. Micheal Osterholm. The excerpts below focus on Dr. Osterholm’s comments. The first rule of holes is if you are in one stop digging. That seems to be what Dr. Osterholm is saying. The potential for serious problems this fall is a reason to forego fall sports. I’ve never heard someone say that the best way to get out of a hole is to pretend you are not in one. www.statnews.com/2020/08/10/winter-is-coming-as-flu-season-nears-americas-window-of-opportunity-to-beat-back-covid-19-is-narrowing/Excerpts start here. The good news: The United States has a window of opportunity to beat back Covid-19 before things get much, much worse. The bad news: That window is rapidly closing. And the country seems unwilling or unable to seize the moment. Winter is coming. Winter means cold and flu season, which is all but sure to complicate the task of figuring out who is sick with Covid-19 and who is suffering from a less threatening respiratory tract infection. “I think November, December, January, February are going to be tough months in this country without a vaccine,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Human coronaviruses, the distant cold-causing cousins of the virus that causes Covid-19, circulate year-round. Now is typically the low season for transmission. But in this summer of America’s failed Covid-19 response, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is widespread across the country, and pandemic-weary Americans seem more interested in resuming pre-Covid lifestyles than in suppressing the virus to the point where schools can be reopened, and stay open, and restaurants, movie theaters, and gyms can function with some restrictions. Osterholm has for months warned that people were being misled about how long the restrictions on daily life would need to be in place. He now thinks the time has come for another lockdown. “What we did before and more,” he said. The country has fallen into a dangerous pattern, Osterholm said, where a spike in cases in a location leads to some temporary restraint from people who eventually become alarmed enough to start to take precautions. But as soon as cases start to plateau or decline a little, victory over the virus is declared and people think it’s safe to resume normal life. Osterholm said with the K-12 school year resuming in some parts of the country or set to start — along with universities — in a few weeks, transmission will take off and cases will start to climb again. He predicted the next peaks will “exceed by far the peak we have just experienced. Winter is only going to reinforce that. Indoor air,” he said.
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Post by jgoodson on Aug 16, 2020 2:15:24 GMT -5
This is a Youtube interview with Bill Gates dated August 6, 2020. He says that we should be out of the pandemic by the end of 2021. In the US we could be out by the first half of 2021. That discussion comes up in the first part of the interview.
He discusses therapeutics at about 6:45 min and states that some in the pipeline hold a lot of promise. By simply waiting until spring 2021 the risk profile of covid-19 could be changed significantly. When you are talking about unpaid college athletes and uncertainty about potential long term health affects, that appears to me to be good reason to delay. Pro athletes are a different story.
One thing that interests me is that Bill Gates resigned his positions on the boards of both Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft in mid March 2020 to focus on his foundation. Gates has been talking about the dangers presented by pandemics going back to 2015 at least. Bill Gates has personal interest in what is going on at both Berkshire and Microsoft. What I was curious about is if the motivation for leaving was to focus more on preparation for the next potential pandemic. Can you imagine a virus with the mortality of Ebola and the contagiousness of Covid 19? Would you want someone competent in charge of the government if that happened?
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Post by jgoodson on Aug 16, 2020 3:30:43 GMT -5
www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29667299/fda-allowing-saliva-based-test-funded-nbaA lot of good can arise from the intersection of science and competent management. I have been impressed by the job the NBA has done with their “Bubble”. This article is about an interesting offshoot of that effort. It is a joint effort by Yale, the NBA and the NBA players union to develop a quick, less expensive Covid 19 test. When I look for reasons to be optimistic about the future and maybe spring ball, it is because of efforts like this. I am a University of Illinois grad and was happy to see the U of I mentioned as part of the overall effort. Excerpts below. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization on Saturday allowing public use of a saliva-based test for the coronavirus developed at Yale University and funded by the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association. The test, known as SalivaDirect, is designed for widespread public screening. The cost per sample could be as low as about $4, though the cost to consumers will likely be higher than that -- perhaps around $15 or $20 in some cases, according to expert sources. The Yale test funded by the league and players' union is simple enough to be used by labs everywhere provided they go through required accreditation processes, said Nathan Grubaugh, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale and one of two senior authors, along with Anne Wyllie, an associate research scientist in epidemiology, behind the saliva studies. Consumers dribble saliva into a narrow tube. Depending on the proximity of the lab, consumers could get results back within a few hours -- and definitely within 24 hours, Grubaugh said. The Yale test removes one cumbersome and expensive step -- the extraction of RNA from samples -- that is a core part of nasal swab tests and the Rutgers test. Scientists warned early in the pandemic about supply chain bottlenecks and shortages in equipment required to extract RNA. The genesis of the Yale-NBA partnership happened in early April, when Grubaugh and the Yale team published preliminary research indicating saliva tests conducted on coronavirus patients and health care workers were as accurate as nasal swab tests. "That was a critically important paper," said Martin Burke, a chemistry professor at the University of Illinois whose team developed a similar direct saliva test. "It was inspiring to us." Illinois is now administering its test to returning faculty and staff -- tens of thousands of people. They intend to test people twice per week, Burke said. When Yale released its initial findings in April, officials in the NBA league office and sports scientists across the league were calling labs and scouring literature for possible clues on how they might develop fast, cheap and easily accessible testing for players. League and team officials were also aware of the criticism they had received early in the pandemic for acquiring tests when they were in short supply and were eager to do something in the broader public interest. One team official -- Robby Sikka, vice president of basketball performance and technology for the Minnesota Timberwolves -- came across the Yale paper and emailed Grubaugh. "We had a lot of strange requests, but this one was at the top," Grubaugh said. "I saw Timberwolves in the subject line and said, 'What the heck?'" The two connected. The research quickly reached the desk of NBA senior vice president David Weiss, the league's point person for coronavirus response -- including the formation of the bubble at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando. "A lot of sports leagues and larger organizations were thinking, 'OK, we're shut down, so what can we do?'" Grubaugh said. "'We are going to have to be testing our population -- players -- all the time if we want to play again. How can we do that?"' The Yale lab at the time did not have its own test; it had used previously existing tests to measure the accuracy of saliva testing. Sikka and the league pitched the idea of building one, and the NBA and players' union offered to fund it. "I was hesitant," Grubaugh said. "We do research. We are not developers of diagnostics. But this was an opportunity. They were willing to fund it. This is a crazy time for everyone anyway. I studied mosquitoes before this. " With players returning to team markets in April and May, the league put out a call for volunteers to take saliva tests -- for the purpose of comparing results to the nasal swab tests the same group would also take. The results showed close to universal agreement between tests, according to Yale's research. The potential for rapid-return, cheap and easy-to-administer saliva tests may have implications for the structure of the 2020-21 NBA season, sources said. Any return to normalcy -- teams traveling to 28 home markets, the presence of even some token number of fans to offset revenue losses -- is dependent on testing becoming easily available. This could be one step, experts said. "Through some miracle, this is working," Grubaugh said. "It's sensitive. It's cheap. And now it's getting approval. I'm not quite sure how we ended up here from April."
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Post by huskerrob on Aug 16, 2020 4:52:33 GMT -5
I believe the best thing to do at this time is just write off the 2020 season. No special adjustments other than enable a player to not count the loss of eligibility much like a medical redshirt. That doesn't mean the scholarship is extended another year, or that a team is endowed with more scholarships for a few years...just that the team and the player can negotiate through options, including giving the player a 1 yr scholarship if one is available or the player transferring to a school with an open scholarship.
The quicker that normality returns to the sport the better, for the students, the pros, the HS players, the coaches, and the schools. Every other option seems to have compounding issues that when combined with the unforeseen consequences, make it worse trying to make it better than just taking it on the chin for a year and moving beyond it. There is going to be hardship no matter what is done, so ease of management seems to be the better path. In racing, when an incident occurs, drivers push through hoping to come out the other side intact. It seems like a good strategy considering the current situation.
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Post by vbcoltrane on Aug 16, 2020 11:09:51 GMT -5
Iowa and Ohio State football parents hand delivered a letter to the Big Ten Office because they "must know" what's going on and there must be transparency and they "need answers."
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