Scott Dochterman breaks down why colleges MUST play football this year

Lose one life to play sports and the loss is infinite.
Do not play sports and the loss is only money.
According to research, about 1 in every 60,000 athletes (at all levels) die while participating each year from sudden cardiac issues. Yet, we still allow sports. When it's clear that playing sports is for sure going to kill some people with Cardiac defects, then why do we still allow sports? Probably because having people participate in athletics is ultimately going to save more lives than it costs.
 

So you're going to volunteer yourself to get infected, right? Your family too?

I'm not. I'm holding out as long as I can.

Why subject yourself to the risk of all the other horrible anecdotes that have been reported about this virus already, let alone all the stuff we don't know yet?

Think of all the people who worked with asbestos for years. They had no clue. I bet if they could've gone back and done it over again, they wouldn't have done it.
Nope I’m not volunteering.
But what I am saying is that I’m probably going to get it at some point anyways whether we reopen now or in 10 months.

Or Let’s wait for a vaccine that may never come. Maybe we should do that but I already think American society Isn’t going to wait that long
 

Nope I’m not volunteering.
But what I am saying is that I’m probably going to get it at some point anyways whether we reopen now or in 10 months.

Or Let’s wait for a vaccine that may never come. Maybe we should do that but I already think American society Isn’t going to wait that long

If our country asked for volunteers to be infected, because it was shown that herd immunity developed faster this way, yes I would do it. I would have no trouble if my family members did it but it would be up to them. For all the people calling those who wish to open up society faster "selfish"... how many of them would be willing?
 

If our country asked for volunteers to be infected, because it was shown that herd immunity developed faster this way, yes I would do it. I would have no trouble if my family members did it but it would be up to them. For all the people calling those who wish to open up society faster "selfish"... how many of them would be willing?

Given that there are COVID parties now (interesting I guess) I’m guessing there would be a fair amount. However it won’t be enough to probably create herd immunity. Many are saying wait until next year. Why is this magically going away next year? I’m not certain it will, a vaccine may or may not come that is effective. This will continue to go on, although being an election year it’s magnified.
 

Without being too flip, sometimes ignorance truly is bliss. We have the world at our fingertips and information without context is scary and can be misleading. People with serious anxiety will tell you they wish they could turn it off but can’t. COVID-19 is scary enough without piling on with outlier type complications. Let’s try to stick to known facts and risks and probabilities to the extent possible. Maybe COVID-19 results in sterility, acquired immunodeficiency, antibody dependent enhancement complications, early onset Alzheimer’s disease, an unexplainable appreciation of The Last Jedi, whatever’s afflicting Bret Bielema.
It's Bert...
 


If our country asked for volunteers to be infected, because it was shown that herd immunity developed faster this way, yes I would do it. I would have no trouble if my family members did it but it would be up to them. For all the people calling those who wish to open up society faster "selfish"... how many of them would be willing?
UK initially took the herd immunity approach with pretty disastrous results.
 


The players are going to be infinitely more safe on campus and in the locker room than they would be out in the real world going to the grocery store, Walmart, et al. On campus they will be surrounded by other young people, availability of frequent testing, and the immediate availability of some of the best medical facilities and resources in the world.

In addition, the players' families are a lot safer without the players living at home, possibly bringing home the virus unwittingly because they are asymptomatic, etc.

No reason to not be playing football come late August
 




While the gophers are my number one team I also have an affinity for my alma mater Cyclones. Jamie Pollard is a pretty good AD. He penned this letter to fans. Offers some more perspective on the schools end.

 

If the revenue sports don’t play this year, we will see massive cuts to the sports offered. Many schools will just shutter their athletic departments, and they will not reopen. It’s the same story with business shutdowns. The longer lockdowns are in place, the more companies that will never reopen. I’m not sure what the tipping point is, but the damage to the economy will take years or decades to overcome. It’s not clear that the lockdowns will do anything more than delay inevitable infections.
 

The players are going to be infinitely more safe on campus and in the locker room than they would be out in the real world going to the grocery store, Walmart, et al. On campus they will be surrounded by other young people, availability of frequent testing, and the immediate availability of some of the best medical facilities and resources in the world.

In addition, the players' families are a lot safer without the players living at home, possibly bringing home the virus unwittingly because they are asymptomatic, etc.

No reason to not be playing football come late August
You forgot to add that they will be too busy studying in their dorm rooms to be going to Walmart, let alone parties. "Surrounded by other people" as a reason to have football. Can't frick'n make it up.
 

If our country asked for volunteers to be infected, because it was shown that herd immunity developed faster this way, yes I would do it. I would have no trouble if my family members did it but it would be up to them. For all the people calling those who wish to open up society faster "selfish"... how many of them would be willing?
Guy in his 30's went to a covid party, and then died.

Talk is cheap. You really gonna put your life, and your family's life, on the line, for pride?? When we might have a vaccine at the end of the calendar year?

Makes no sense, to me.

Like I said, if we get to New Year's and they like "yeah, we were totally wrong, gonna need probably another year for a vaccine", then I'm more sympathetic.
 



If the revenue sports don’t play this year, we will see massive cuts to the sports offered. Many schools will just shutter their athletic departments, and they will not reopen. It’s the same story with business shutdowns. The longer lockdowns are in place, the more companies that will never reopen. I’m not sure what the tipping point is, but the damage to the economy will take years or decades to overcome. It’s not clear that the lockdowns will do anything more than delay inevitable infections.
Fine, shut it down ... then when things go back to normal, re-open it.

That's what restaurants do. A place opens, tries it out, lasts a while, then shuts it down. But all the expensive equipment stays in place. Next hopeful owner comes in, changes the motif, and re-opens.

That spot on Hennepin in Uptown has been like 10 different things since Old Chicago closed.
 

Nope I’m not volunteering.
But what I am saying is that I’m probably going to get it at some point anyways whether we reopen now or in 10 months.

Or Let’s wait for a vaccine that may never come. Maybe we should do that but I already think American society Isn’t going to wait that long
There's reasonable hope of a vaccine within ~6 months. We are ~2 years away from achieving herd immunity at the current average pace of infection (though if we stay at the rate we are right now it will happen faster).

Going for herd immunity would seem to be a foolish choice right now. A lot of people may get sick and die in the next 6 months who didn't have to. If we get to next March and there's no effective vaccine/treatment, that math may well change.
 

There's reasonable hope of a vaccine within ~6 months. We are ~2 years away from achieving herd immunity at the current average pace of infection (though if we stay at the rate we are right now it will happen faster).

Going for herd immunity would seem to be a foolish choice right now. A lot of people may get sick and die in the next 6 months who didn't have to. If we get to next March and there's no effective vaccine/treatment, that math may well change.
There is not reasonable hope for a vaccine that is distributed widely in the next 6 months.
 

There is not reasonable hope for a vaccine that is distributed widely in the next 6 months.
Not widely, but distributed to at-risk populations is still a reasonable hope. By then we'll also hopefully know more about the long term effects, and have even more treatment options for when people are positive to make severe cases less likely.

If that happens, and I think there is reason to hope it might, by spring we may be able to get back to some amount of normalcy with relative safety.
 

There is not reasonable hope for a vaccine that is distributed widely in the next 6 months.
Not correct.

The US will get some of the first of 300M doses of the Oxford/Astra candidate, should it prove out, by the end of the calendar year.
 

Not correct.

The US will get some of the first of 300M doses of the Oxford/Astra candidate, should it prove out, by the end of the calendar year.
Widely distributed meaning have over 50% of the country received the vaccine
 

Widely distributed meaning have over 50% of the country received the vaccine
Maybe true, maybe not. Why is 50% distributed an important milestone?

If 10% get it in Dec, and it proves highly effective, with a big shipment in Feb, seems like pretty much victory at that point.
 

There is not reasonable hope for a vaccine that is distributed widely in the next 6 months.

From the interview I posted earlier in this thread (#8), Larry Brilliant says this:

We are simultaneously testing the safety and the efficacy and the efficiency of vaccine candidates. You may begrudge the fact that it’s not days or months, but you have to be optimistic about creating a novel vaccine in the length of time that Tony Fauci is talking about, 12 to 18 months. I think that period of time was prescient when he said it. I think it is still true from the date that he said it. So 12 months from now, which is within the 12 to 18 months, I think we will have quantities of a vaccine.
 

Not widely, but distributed to at-risk populations is still a reasonable hope. By then we'll also hopefully know more about the long term effects, and have even more treatment options for when people are positive to make severe cases less likely.

If that happens, and I think there is reason to hope it might, by spring we may be able to get back to some amount of normalcy with relative safety.

There are numerous safety hurdles to overcome in addition to determining whether a vaccine offers durable immunity to the elderly. There may be a need for one or more boosters, for example. Vaccines have paradoxical potential to worsen disease in some people with some viral diseases. This covers some of the problems:


How realistic is a 12- to 18-month timeframe for a COVID-19 vaccine?
This prediction, made early in the pandemic, raised a lot of eyebrows in the vaccine scientific and development community. We would all like to see a vaccine quickly, but the fastest vaccine developed to date has been for mumps, and that took four years. With any new disease, especially one that is proving to be as complex as COVID-19, we will have to move carefully.

We can expect that by end of this year, or early 2021, one or more vaccines will have data from thousands of healthy volunteers indicating safety, tolerability, and stimulation of an immune response that may be protective. But to be confident that a vaccine is truly safe and protective, that is not enough.

With any new disease, especially one that is proving to be as complex as COVID-19, we will have to move carefully.”
– Rick Malley
To show that the vaccine prevents disease, we have to vaccinate a large cohort of people while the virus is actively circulating, to see how many vaccinated versus unvaccinated people develop COVID-19. As the number of COVID-19 cases drops in the U.S. and Europe, getting enough patients to prove efficacy becomes a major logistical challenge. Moreover, a vaccine can have side effects that only become evident when tested in subjects of all ages, who are monitored over a period of time. Some vaccine candidates have actually made disease worse in people who eventually do become infected. History tells us that vaccines can fail, in either early or late stages of development.

Finally, once we have a COVID-19 vaccine, billions of doses would need to be manufactured to cover much of the world population and provide the “herd immunity” that curbs the spread of the virus. Never has a vaccine been rolled out at such a scale, and massive new factories would likely need to be built.

Recognizing this, some manufacturers are starting to build manufacturing plants ahead of time. Still, until enough doses are available, we may need to roll out the vaccine in stages, starting with people who are most vulnerable or at highest risk for being exposed to COVID-19 — the elderly, some immunocompromised patients, health care professionals, and other essential workers.

Is there reason to take special care with a COVID-19 vaccine?
All vaccines can run into safety issues during testing, but we may need to pay even greater attention to safety in the case of COVID-19. What started as a respiratory illness is now evolving into a much more complicated syndrome with many varied and unpredictable effects. That includes runaway immune reactions in some people that we still don’t understand.

Getting safety issues wrong with a COVID-19 vaccine could set us back for years or even decades.”
– Rick Malley
In particular, we have recently learned that this virus can cause a multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), which likely starts several weeks after the child has been exposed. To date, we do not understand why some children develop this syndrome while the majority do not, or why this syndrome targets children specifically. We need to learn much more about how people’s immune responses sometimes protect them and other times contribute to more damage, so we can avoid triggering harmful responses with a vaccine.

While there is urgency to find a way out of this pandemic, safety considerations must remain an absolute priority. As with most vaccines, a COVID-19 vaccine would be given to mostly healthy people whose risk of severe complications from the virus is not very high. Therefore, serious side effects from the vaccine itself must be extremely rare to make it acceptable to most.

And general acceptance of a COVID-19 vaccine is not a given: a recent study and polls suggest that a quarter to a half of the U.S. population would not be willing to receive it. Some people may legitimately fear that if a vaccine is developed too quickly, there won’t be time to adequately test it. Getting safety issues wrong with a COVID-19 vaccine could set us back for years or even decades.

Should we be optimistic about the development of a COVID-19 vaccine?
Yes, I think so. On the one hand, a vaccine has never been developed against a coronavirus — including SARS, MERS, or coronaviruses causing the common cold. At the same time, never in the history of medicine has such an intense global effort been focused on the development of a specific vaccine. Vaccine development is often described as an empirical science: different approaches are tried, many fail, but one or two prove to be successful. There are now more than 150 different candidate COVID-19 vaccines in different stages of development, which gives me hope that one or more of these will help us get rid of this virus.

 




You forgot to add that they will be too busy studying in their dorm rooms to be going to Walmart, let alone parties. "Surrounded by other people" as a reason to have football. Can't frick'n make it up.
Probably a solid move not to address, you know, the primary point of the post; not difficult to make an argument that the students are better off on campus, and their parents better off without them at home. UM students would get better care on campus than anywhere in the world, if they actually got sick.
 




Not sure if you actually read the NY Times article you were responding to, but context to those death statistics you provided is essential. As the article states:

the coronavirus is blamed for 5,420 deaths in Sweden, according to the World Health Organization. That might not sound especially horrendous compared with the more than 129,000 Americans who have died. But Sweden is a country of only 10 million people. Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more deaths than the United States, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark.

And, the article continues, Sweden essentially suffered that high per capita death rate, but received virtually none of the economic benefits in return, when compared to other Scandinavian countries that went into early lockdown.
 

Not sure if you actually read the NY Times article you were responding to, but context to those death statistics you provided is essential. As the article states:

the coronavirus is blamed for 5,420 deaths in Sweden, according to the World Health Organization. That might not sound especially horrendous compared with the more than 129,000 Americans who have died. But Sweden is a country of only 10 million people. Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more deaths than the United States, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark.

And, the article continues, Sweden essentially suffered that high per capita death rate, but received virtually none of the economic benefits in return, when compared to other Scandinavian countries that went into early lockdown.
On the bright side Sweden seems to be over covid. So there are pros and cons to everything
 




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