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Steve

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Meanwhile, American attempts at a sort of normalcy are going awry in many ways. One area is, of all things, baseball

 

About two-thirds of the scheduled games for the season were wiped out by the pandemic. To get at least some games in, MLB put out a 60-game schedule, played in each team's home stadium without fans. Unlike basketball, hockey, or soccer, there is no "bubble", probably because no facility has enough diamonds and quality facilities to hold 15 games a day, every day, for two months. Players are still supposed ot be self-isolating while not at the ballpark. They are expected to shower at home and in their hotel rooms (the team buses after games must reek). However the players still have to travel -- and this has led to huge issues for one team, the Miami Marlins.

 

Given how badly the franchise has been run over the years, it had to be the Marlins.

 

Originally four players tested positive prior to last Sunday's game in Philadelphia. Then twelve more players and two coaches got positive results before they were supposed to go home for their opening series. This led to an immediate reaction. The flights back to Florida were canceled, as was the two-game series against the Orioles they were supposed to play yesterday and today. The team is stuck in their hotel in Philadelphia until the players who test negative are cleared to travel.

 

Philadelphia was supposed to host a game against the Yankees yesterday, but it wasn;t considered safe for the visiting team to use the visiting locker room until it had been thoroughly sanitized from top to bottom.

 

Commissioner Bob Manfred said something like this could have happened, and the plans for restarting the season took it into account. But many outside the leagues are questioning whether it would have been a better idea to call off the season entirely, and have suggested cancelling all 57 remaining game dates. Needless to say, ownership isn't buying it, and neither are the players (though some prominent players have already said they have no intention of playing during the crisis).

 

Meanwhile, MLS has had a tournament in a "bubble" with few incidents. The NBA is in a similar bubble and is expected to resume play soon. The NHL has two, one for each conference, and is planning to start a play-in series set for the playoffs. None of these have had an incident nearly on the scale of what happened with the Marlins.

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You can also bet the NFL has been paying extremely close attention to this.  

 

The owners will hopefully realize that this represents the actual worst case...far worse than cancelling the season.  Trying, getting whole teams sick, having to shut down.  Owners look greedy;  players look greedy, desperate, or reckless;  and the whole thing is a total failure.  The season is already a total joke;  the games matter only to DFS players.  (Even sponsors are probably pulling back because there'll be zero overall fan buzz, and that translates to very low viewership.)  Individual stats will be an utter joke.

 

AND of course, you're putting the team, the coaches, all the support staff, the traveling people...all of them are at risk.  For a product we want?  If it was regular baseball, it'd be great, but this will be some diluted version.  

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2 hours ago, unclevlad said:

You can also bet the NFL has been paying extremely close attention to this.  

 

The owners will hopefully realize that this represents the actual worst case...far worse than cancelling the season.  Trying, getting whole teams sick, having to shut down.  Owners look greedy;  players look greedy, desperate, or reckless;  and the whole thing is a total failure.  The season is already a total joke;  the games matter only to DFS players.  (Even sponsors are probably pulling back because there'll be zero overall fan buzz, and that translates to very low viewership.)  Individual stats will be an utter joke.

 

AND of course, you're putting the team, the coaches, all the support staff, the traveling people...all of them are at risk.  For a product we want?  If it was regular baseball, it'd be great, but this will be some diluted version.  

 

Can't see any games by the local team without buying a special cable package which is irritating considering that (even I) could walk to the ballpark from here.

 

I guess I could go stand outside the ballpark and play Pokemon Go.

 

Frankly, I have no idea who is playing for the team this year and not a lot of desire to find out since I can't watch any of the games.

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43 minutes ago, archer said:

 

Can't see any games by the local team without buying a special cable package which is irritating considering that (even I) could walk to the ballpark from here.

 

I guess I could go stand outside the ballpark and play Pokemon Go.

 

Frankly, I have no idea who is playing for the team this year and not a lot of desire to find out since I can't watch any of the games.

 

Not knowing a substantial fraction of the players is gonna be common.

 

But yeah...what totally rags me off with MLB is the utterly asinine broadcasting rules.  

--The vast majority are on regional sports nets, and MANY require you to buy the fairly expensive regional sports package, on top of the digital package.

--The blackout rules used to be worse;  the blackouts have narrowed *somewhat*.  I'm subject to blackout on Rangers and Astros games...BUT...even if those games *are not being broadcast on their regional net* I'm still blacked out.  WHY?  (Answer, most likely, is simpler to implement, and the fan has no advocate to change the system.)

--Access to the regional networks is gonna vary with carrier and package, but it's hit or miss.  I can't get, for example, Dodger games IIRC.

--And baseball refuses to drop the blackout rules even for the MLB.TV game package, a subscription service!!!  ARGH!!  It may be that the big clubs want to minimize revenue sharing with the small clubs;  that'd be my first guess.  The big media deals (Dodgers, Yankees, etc.) are, IIRC, 9-digit revenue streams...and that's all to the local club.

 

I personally suspect a significant reason why certain teams were popular, was because they were easily found, anywhere in the country, on TV.  Braves back in the day.  Yankees and Red Sox now both pipe feeds to MLB Network quite a bit, which is a notable reason, I think, why we see them.  

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13 hours ago, Old Man said:

Texas posted 650 deaths yesterday. Not to be outdone, Florida has over 300 hospitalized children, and over 30000 children who have tested positive, as schools are set to be forcibly reopened by their Republican governor. 

 

Schools will open up in most places within the next couple weeks.  IMO, the full power of this virus will be revealed come early September.  :(

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I think that a lot of people simply won't get it until the virus afflicts (or even kills) someone they know and love.  I'm not immune to this...I mean, I'd like to think my family has been cautious, but the prospects of my better half--or the kids!--getting this is terrifying.  I hope it never bridges the gap between prospect and reality.

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17 hours ago, Old Man said:

Texas posted 650 deaths yesterday. Not to be outdone, Florida has over 300 hospitalized children, and over 30000 children who have tested positive, as schools are set to be forcibly reopened by their Republican governor. 

 

I wonder if that was some sort of adjustment for a previous time period.  That number is more than triple the previous 5 day trend and almost quadruple the day after.

 

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1 hour ago, ScottishFox said:

 

I wonder if that was some sort of adjustment for a previous time period.  That number is more than triple the previous 5 day trend and almost quadruple the day after.

 

 

Official Texas numbers are known to be trashed since the administration forced hospitals to report to HHS instead of the CDC starting a week ago.  At minimum there has been a backlog while they figured out the new procedure.  The hospitals post their own data, but I haven't had time to run around collecting it all, which may be the point.

 

Regardless of the cause there have been similar reporting spikes in other states and countries all along, for various reasons.  It just means the death toll was worse than we thought it was over the past few days.

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10 minutes ago, Old Man said:

 

Official Texas numbers are known to be trashed since the administration forced hospitals to report to HHS instead of the CDC starting a week ago.  At minimum there has been a backlog while they figured out the new procedure.  The hospitals post their own data, but I haven't had time to run around collecting it all, which may be the point.

 

Regardless of the cause there have been similar reporting spikes in other states and countries all along, for various reasons.  It just means the death toll was worse than we thought it was over the past few days.

 

Texas did adjust their reporting method recently.  The Covidtracker website I use mentioned their numbers could swim around for awhile while everyone gets used to the new method.

 

That being said they have recently bumped their data quality rating for Texas from B to A.

 

Oh, and I just found specific commentary from them related to this (emphasis mine):

On July 27, Texas added 675 additional deaths through death certificate reviews. However only 44 deaths were truly new deaths on July 27. This will inflate the daily increase in deaths until the timeseries has been backfilled based on this revision.

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Also in Texas - the in-person learning at schools has been pushed back to September 8th.  Everyone will be online and hating it from August 18th until then.

 

My kiddo in the gifted and talented program has been frustrated to the point of tears by the clumsy patchwork implementation of the online offering.  I can just imagine how much fun this has been for technically adverse parents or kids who struggle with their school work without the additional hassle.

 

 

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44 minutes ago, Starlord said:

My wife is a teacher.  Trust me when I say that a lot of teachers, many of whom fall into an at-risk category, are not hating online learning.  Next to an actual infectious disease lab or a hospital, I can't think of a worse place to be than schools or daycare centers.

I would rate the infectious disease lab safer then the schools as long as you are not a test subject.

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2 hours ago, Starlord said:

My wife is a teacher.  Trust me when I say that a lot of teachers, many of whom fall into an at-risk category, are not hating online learning.  Next to an actual infectious disease lab or a hospital, I can't think of a worse place to be than schools or daycare centers.

 

Restaurant, Bar, Church, CostCo or other large retailer with thousands of daily customers, etc.

 

There are LOTS of people in the essential worker category that are exposed to customers all day, every day.  If kids can get a quality education online and not suffer from socialization and mental health issues - that'd be fine, but for many unfortunate kids staying home means they don't get decent meals, get abused or are lonely to the point of self-harm.

 

2020 sucks.  I feel like all of the answers are variations of a Taoist symbol where death and misery chase each other around in an endless cycle.

 

Right now with the quarantine we're losing more people to suicide and drug overdoses than the actual illness.  That comes with a huge increase in domestic violence and child abuse.

Though, I don't doubt that sending all of the kids back to school would eventually result in dead teachers and dead parents.  Possibly even more than we're losing to staying home.

 

I'd like to fast forward to January 2022, please.

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42 minutes ago, ScottishFox said:

 

Restaurant, Bar, Church, CostCo or other large retailer with thousands of daily customers, etc.

 

 

The difference between working with dozens of adults and working with dozens of children is light years in my experience.  Should be pretty clear to any parent or school employee.

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44 minutes ago, Starlord said:

 

The difference between working with dozens of adults and working with dozens of children is light years in my experience.  Should be pretty clear to any parent or school employee.

 

The cashier and bagger at the CostCo are doing hundreds of people a day.  Same for the guy at the gas station, the lady at the liquor store, etc.

 

I get what you're saying (I've taught kids in decades gone by for karate classes), but the sheer volume the cashiers are dealing with would seem to be a higher risk.  Especially given how filthy money is.

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3 hours ago, ScottishFox said:

 

Right now with the quarantine we're losing more people to suicide and drug overdoses than the actual illness.

 

We lost about 2/3 the current US Covid-19 death toll to suicide and drug overdose last year, so I wouldn't lay the whole blame for their 2020 death statistics on the pandemic.

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So, by the data on WorldOMeters...

 

Today, the US deaths per million people just passed France for the first time.  

 

Mind, Brazil's catching up *far* too fast, tragically for them.  The graphs for Brazil are just frightening...their daily numbers have followed a scary-consistent pattern based on weekday, but the overall average has been 1000 deaths a day...for 9 weeks running.  On top of that...the new case numbers were similarly consistent for about 4 weeks starting around the solstice, but in the last week new case numbers have skyrocketed.  And today they smashed past the prior highest daily count...it was ~65K, and it's 70K with a couple more hours before WorldOMeters' day ends.  Record number of deaths, too.

 

Not gonna go anywhere, probably, but...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/brazil-medics-seek-icc-probe-bolsonaro-gov-covid-19-response-200728070931384.html

 

 

 

 

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4 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

If I was doing hundreds of people a day, it wouldn't be coronavirus that kills me. :help:

 

It's not as hard as it seems Just be fast, efficient and courteous as you see the customer through the process. Before long, they'll be as professional as you are, and have no problem with intimate sharing with your interface.

 

. . . Okay, I'm reaching with the last bit.  I also find the comparison a bit disingenuous. We're dealing with adults, here. (The kids are below counter level). And we have our plexiglas shields. 

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