Sources: Expect the NBA back playing by mid/late June with 10 reg season games before POs

From my perspective, what I want is a timeline. Will we know more in December than October? Probably. And then we'll know more February than we will in December. That's why I'm wary -- you can always make that argument to keep pushing things back.

(And no, before anyone says it, the virus doesn't completely make the timeline. If it did, we'd all be under total lockdown. As with most things, it's a balancing act of multiple considerations.)

I'm open to delaying it more, but I'm not fine with just the generalized "well, maybe we'll know more" logic. Because you can keep that argument going forever.

As for the other groups, for starters, I don't think media are going to be present. The NBA is really restricting it to essential personnel. As far as others, it's everybody's own choice as to what risk they want to take. To me, that's a more realistic and fair plan for society moving forward than shutting down indefinitely on blind hope.

 

For the record, I agree it's more likely than not that there will be a vaccine, I was just pointing out that it's far from a given.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-04-17/coronavirus-vaccine-ian-frazer/12146616

I think a fair balance between quality of life and mitigating risk, as it pertains to sports, is exactly what you said. I'm just pushing back on those who think that games even without fans and with regular testing in a bubble environment are still too risky. That, to me, is too restrictive for a timeline that could drag on for years.

(With that said, I also want to clarify that I'm not suggesting that players or any other "essential personnel" be forced to do it. It's everyone's own choice as to what level of risk they're willing to accept, and if a certain volume of the population doesn't want to participate, then at that point it's probably not worth it. I 100% respect the wishes of anyone who chooses not to be a part of it. I just think, knowing what we know now about the virus and its timeline, it should be their choice to make.)

 

That said there needs be exit plans, corrections when things do not go the way Silver planned.

I am thinking of fewer games, fewer practice sessions.

When things really go south, you'd consider crowning a champion based on the games that were played before or just one game per series.

If they run out of healthy starters, play bench or players on 2 way contracts.

Bigger rotations of 10 to 13 players in the playoffs.

 

I think the biggest key is transparency. Set standards of what and where the benchmarks for health and safety are. The strangest argument I've seen on Twitter on recent days is "what if LeBron gets it?" and such. I mean, if it's just him, that's just crappy luck for the Lakers. The league shouldn't come back if one positive test is all it takes to shut it all down again. Quite frankly, they'd be insanely lucky if they got through all of this with only one positive result.

OTOH, there has to be a limit to where the outbreak is simply too large to be allowed to continue. Set the parameters going in so that everyone involved isn't flying blind and also makes the most informed decisions possible. Unfortunately, we'll probably need to keep those parameters in place for next season, too.

 

Data is important to counteract the fear pornographers.

United States COVID Death Data

• 59% of COVID deaths have been people age 85 or older.
• 0.3% of COVID deaths have been people age 34 or younger
• 40% of COVID deaths have been people living in nursing homes
• 89% of COVID deaths have involved major pre-existing health conditions, such as hypertension, lung issues, or diabetes

The risk to NBA players is incredibly low. Start this season back up again!

 

I'm not confident at all that a successful vaccine for SARS-CoV2 will ever be made, never mind 12 months from now. There are no vaccines currently for human pathogenic coronaviruses. Any of them. (There is one for bovine coronavirus.) Attempts to make a vaccine for the first SARS, in 2002, ended poorly. The animal models that were tested had higher mortality from the vaccine than from the bug. Attempts to make one several years later for the CoV that causes MERS, also ended in failure.

But let's say molecular biology has advanced enough, and we get one for this strain of CoV. How long will it take for this strain to mutate to a strain that's also pathogenic, but sufficiently different that the vaccine isn't effective? I.e., what we see with influenza every year.

All of this is to say we can't wait until a vaccine arrives before letting people go back to work. Including the NBA. Restrict access to nursing homes and other concentrations of highly vulnerable people, sure. (NBA players are about as far from a vulnerable population to COVID as it's possible to make.) Everyone else needs to practice good hygiene and get back to doing what they were doing. Stay home if you want, it's a free country.

 

Please get something started. Anything. Jordan disrespected Horace Grant, Jordan the GOAT trash talker, Jordan's shoe empire, How many more titles if....Jordan this, Jordan that. I am so tired of hearing about Michael Jordan.

 

At this point it isn't just the death rate.

You'd worry about your parents, your relatives, not to say a portion of younger rehabilitated people had lasting lung problems and more.

Numbers really do not convey any emotional impact of a tragedy.

Thing is the majority of population do have one pre-existing condition or two.

 

To make it seem they were an abject failure is a stretch. The research wasn't completed because of lack of funding and interest due to both SARS and MERS outbreaks being contained before a vaccine was necessary. It's really hard to do a phase 3 trial when there is basically no one infected, unless you want to volunteer people as tributes.

I do agree there is too much "hope" and such being put on development of an effective vaccine being rushed out the door. I'm fairly skeptical of a legitimate one coming out in 2 years. Even if it works, there will be major production and distribution issues as proven with more simple things like masks and face shields. And even further, there are so many people already afraid of current vaccines with decades of long-term safety data. There will be none of that for this vaccine.

My issues with just letting people return to work immediately are numerous, but include

1. You cannot use the messaging that "a second wave of shutdowns" is the worst case scenario. That should be expected at some point in the next 2 years. By using this message leaders will undermine any credibility they have when that situation comes to pass.

2. People have to actually buy in to the daily preventative measures. This means wearing their face masks properly and actually maintaining 6 feet. People aren't doing this really anywhere. The reason so many officials went so severe with restrictions was because people were openly flouting all these recommendations.

3. There has to be better safety net to help people go back to work. If we don't open schools, we need better systems for child care. If we don't want sick people at work, we need mandated sick leave for EVERYONE including Amazon workers, gig workers, etc. Even if you send people back to work, there will still be hundreds of businesses that will close because they won't make margins. So while it will improve the unemployment numbers, they will not "go back to what they were". So you have create a better safety net for those people.

4. We have to make sure all those PPE and ventilators are actually being made and will be distributed appropriately for the next crest.

5. No matter how the NBA tries to spin it. Using thousands of swab tests on asymptomatic employees is slap in the face to thousands of Americans.

The issue is that sending people back to work can be done somewhat, but there are multiple steps that need to be in place.

Just saying "look at Sweden" doesn't work because you have to understand why it hasn't gotten as bad yet as some predicted. Most people there are following social distancing and mask usage. The have all the social safety nets that I mentioned above in place and many more. Their population has super high trust in their officials (like 80-90%). Also, they are basically in the early, everyone infected is in Stockholm but not the rest of the country phase (like US was with NYC). They have a population of ~10-11 million with high densities in a few places.

 

My answer is you bunker down. There is no breaking point. If it is a forever thing, we bunker, and what we do is invent. We fight. Even if it's Avatars, Space travel, Virtual Worlds, or Portals. We find a way to improve the quality of life. It's an opportunity for all of us. Time and Life change. But we have to live to have quality of life.

Once we have our solution, we emerge.

 

I'd like to show folks this data. What link did you pull it from?

 

I agree, the Lebron comment was bizarre, he would shake it off in 1-2 months, the Lakers won't it all.

Why not just enjoy e-sports? That has been up and coming.

 

One thing I don't think any government is doing, which they should, is preparing not just for the next virus, but a time when a virus is so deadly that essential workers are in such fear they can't do their job either. That time will come some day. Prepare now for how to deal with it.

 

You make decent points, but serology testing is showing more and more than a whole lot more people have caught this than we had thought, with little to no symptoms beyond a nasty cold. The death rate isn't the 3 percent it was thought to be, nevermind the 10-15 percent that was feared when this looked like SARS 2.0 back in January.

More like 0.3% CFR instead, and that vast majority of those were people with profound pre-existing conditions, and/or the elderly. Go look at how dramatically death rates for garden variety cardiovascular disease, stroke, and diabetes have fallen, as COVID death rates rose. The CFR might even be less than that, the way Medicare billing put their thumb on the scale with allowing surcharges for COVID patients versus non-COVID. You want to say keep the elderly secure, and work out some kind of safety net or other way they can obtain necessities, I'm right there with you. It does look like it's Death on two legs when it comes to nursing home residents.

For everybody else, this is within an order of magnitude of a bad flu season. It doesn't come close to being as debilitating as previous US epidemics like polio or smallpox, either in fatalities or sequelae. We didn't shut down businesses in 1967 for the Hong Kong Flu, or the swine flu of the late 70s, or H1N1 in 2009, and it was a mistake to do it with this bug.

We were worried about the peak number of critical cases overwhelming hospital resources. Other than NYC, that hasn't happened, and NYC has its own reasons why that critical infrastructure failure occurred. We are past the peak of the curve for new cases, have been for some time, yet the public health goalposts now get moved to, "We can't reopen until there's a vaccine." Or "The second wave is coming!"

Waiting until a vaccine shows up to let people go back to work is lunacy.

 

No. You can stay at home all you want. We are not bunkering anywhere. Nor should we. Or be prohibited from doing anything but bunkering at home.

If we catch COVID, and given the number of asymptomatic people who've antibodies to the virus, we may have already caught it and gotten over it, the overwhelming odds are that it will present at the most, as a minor, annoying respiratory bug with fever and unproductive cough for a few days. If you're over 70, really over 80, yes, avoid this as much as you can. If you're rocking a >35 BMI, or are asthmatic, try to avoid it too.

Everyone could stand to wash their hands and pay attention to personal hygiene. But that's because there are a lot of nasty, communicable bugs about there besides SARS-CoV2. Like Hepatitis A, B, E; 'regular' influenza; the common cold. Hell, California had a Typhus outbreak recently. Typhus! Like it was the Eastern Front or something.

Assuming that because of COVID, the rest of us need to start living like it's Ready Player One is a fantasy.

 

Ignoring the fact that you are not account for people who end up hospitalized, here are some other numbers.

10 players currently older than 35 years old.
383 players played minutes in an NBA game during the month of March 2020. Even at a 0.3% rate, 1 of those players could die by playing in the NBA for 10 games. What if the rate is higher for a different patient population? What was the margin of error?
27 of 30 NBA head coaches are older than 40 years old. (1 is 39 yo.)
34% of US Athletes below 34 years old have high blood pressures. https://heart.bmj.com/content/105/16/1223
~40% of African Americans have high blood pressure.
~75% of the NBA players are African American.

Statistics don't end discussions. They are not mic drops.

They are information and tools and can be spun just like anything else.

Methods of what they measure and how the were measured are often more important than the numbers themselves.

 

Yes, there is a large percentage of the population who has this asymptotically. Yes death rate for other thing fell at that moment, mainly because many of who would have died end up passing away at home without medical cause identified. When morgues are overwhelmed, not everyone's cause of death will be correctly identified. I treat cancer patients. Everyone at my hospital is expecting an increased in cancer related deaths over the next year because we were unable to give those patient timely treatment for their disease.

You keep talking about death rates, but patients who do not die take weeks to recover in hospital beds or even at home. Recovery times are up to twice as long as the normal flu, and many times longer. On top of that, we are still learning about long-term effects causing chronic respiratory fibrosis in some patients and now new illnesses in children.

I would also caution about the "past the peak." We are past the peak in NYC, but a lot of states may not be. Hard to know with how poor testing has been implemented.

I'm not saying that means that does not mean don't open up. Trust me, I have never argued to wait for vaccine. As testing has been so poorly performed and up scaled, it has become more apparent that a full economy cannot really wait for that either. We are at like Plan U, and we don't have time to wait for the more ideal plans to work themselves out.

But the too few people are taking the correct policy measures to get at least some things back running in this situation. And we need many of those things, not for a "fully functional economy" but just to have a functional society. This thing isn't over at all. This isn't halftime. This is the end of the 2nd inning. There is a long way to go.

 

Fear pornographers is such a good term. I only wish I had a good term for the more corrupt and conniving exploiters of fear we're seeing as well.

 

Still like the word food p0rn better.

 

lol exactly....lets VAR the refs