COVID-19 Roundup: Lay Off the Bleach!
This is the latest installment of a series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.
Preliminary results from a recent study of antibody tests among New York City residents revealed that 13.9% of tested people came back positive for COVID-19 antibodies. That’s good news in a couple of ways. It’s another test that suggests that, at least preliminarily, the actual fatality rate may be lower than the observed case fatality rate (CFR). This happened with H1N1 in 2009, which also saw the estimated fatality rate, post-outbreak, come far below the observed CFR.
It also suggests the health care system might be able to continue to treat patients, if not in ideal fashion, at least avoiding the worst of experiences of countries like Italy, though reports of the experiences of front-line health care workers across the US, and particularly in places like New York City, serve as a grim a reminder of why it is so important to stay home.
What it means for the return of activities like organized baseball, however, remains to be seen, as such a return is obviously far more dependent on widely available tests for current infection and a decline in fatalities and hospital resource usage in states like Arizona and Florida.
And please, do not inject yourself with bleach or Lysol, whatever the president says!
MLB The Show is MLB The Show
Perhaps one of the only businesses thriving right now, at least of those that don’t make toilet paper, is Sony Interactive Entertainment San Diego, the developers of MLB The Show 20 for the PlayStation 4. Without much real baseball, you’ve seen a lot more exposure for the game than I can ever remember. We now have major league players streaming games against each other live, with ESPN and other networks set to broadcast select games from the MLB The Show Players League. The first broadcast was last night, with the next one coming Sunday night.
Korean Baseball Organization, ESPN at an Impasse
One of the bits of news that excited me last week was the prospect of seeing more KBO games broadcast live in the United States. If you haven’t watched one of their broadcasts before, the energy and excitement the crowds bring is quite refreshing, even if you do not speak the language (I don’t). What comes across is a league in which fun appears to be the priority, a sometimes sharp contrast with what is often an over-serious sport here. Theme songs, chants, bat flips — anything goes!
So it was disappointing to hear that there were hiccups in ESPN’s attempts to broadcast KBO games in the United States to help fill the programming void. Unfortunately, the catch appears to be that ESPN wanted the rights to the games for free. KBO baseball is established in South Korea and while a whole new audience is tempting, it’s a business and a league that is far beyond the point of needing to “work for exposure.”
COVID-19 Outbreak in Venezuela
While individual major league players have largely been spared from the effects of COVID-19 (though not always their family members), not everyone in baseball has been so fortunate. In Nueva Esparta, a small state consisting of three islands off the northern coast of Venezuela, there have been 93 reported cases of COVID-19, 83 of which are connected to the Roberto Vahlis academy. This makes up nearly a third of Venezuela’s reported coronavirus cases. The Phillies signed an outfielder, Yhoswar Garcia, out of the academy just last month.
More Teams Extend Benefits
In Wednesday’s COVID-19 roundup from my colleague Tony Wolfe, there was a handy-dandy reference chart of which teams have extended non-player employee salaries and for how long. Since Wednesday, the Texas Rangers have reiterated that there would be no layoffs or furloughs until at least the end of May. The Mets are at least formulating a plan for June and beyond, past their previous May 31 commitment. And the Pirates extending their employment guarantee to May 31 also just missed our publication time.
NHL Moves Closer to Reboot
There’s safety in numbers (well, maybe not), and MLB now has more company when it comes to leagues trying to find creative ways to continue their suspended seasons. The NHL is exploring their own version of baseball’s Arizona/Florida solution. The NHL initially tried exploring a neutral site plan, but found the logistics too difficult to overcome, so the current plan under consideration involves a number of regional “hubs” at which teams would play.
How Taiwan Restarted Baseball
This isn’t really new news in itself, but there was a highly detailed piece describing the steps that Taiwan needed to take in order to make starting the season practical. It’s going to take a lot more to get baseball going than just confining players to hotels. Hygiene will be especially important, and could present a challenge for a sport known for so much spitting and licking of hands.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
I’m pretty sure the survey you mentioned in the first paragraph said that about 13.9% of New York *state* residents had Covid-19 antibodies and it was roughly 21% in New York *city*. Makes a difference because that means upstate NY (where I live) is probably around the 5% mark.
That’s correct. But keep in mind, even that number has come under some dispute. If the sensitivity of the test is only 95%, that would inflate the numbers further. (the good news is that with a 5% hit rate in upstate NY, it can’t be *too* far off).
It depends on which test(s) they used.
The CDC test is as close to 100% accurate as posible but most of the commercial tests run from 85% to 96%.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/21/838794281/study-raises-questions-about-false-negatives-from-quick-covid-19-test
Interestingly, the earlier quickie drive-thru tests skewed heavily towards false positives sending people rushing to hospitals where they then came out negative.
You’re mixing test types here — that article is tests for active viral infection, this is antibodies from past infection.
To my limited knowledge there is no “gold standard” CoV-2 antibody test or an understanding of what that would even mean.
I’ve been told that Florian Krammer at Mt Sinai Hospital has developed a “gold standard” antibody test, but you’re right–fjtorres is referring to active infection tests. But maybe that was just a friend of Florian Krammer pumping him up.
Fourteen Ab tests were analyzed by a group of fifty researchers. Only one test showed no false positives:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/health/coronavirus-antibody-tests.html
Testing is overhyped, given the uncertainties about the tests.
The real need is for a *certified* treatment.
And the way FDA runs, that’s not coming soon.
The other issue I have seen is whether this and other tests are finding specific COVID-19 antibodies, or just antibodies to ANY coronavirus. That is a very important distinction and nobody seems to be entirely sure of the answer.
And if they are against this virus, at this level do they render the person immune?
Or will the person get infected with less severity but still shed virus to others?
Or no effect? (not all antibodies are “neutralizing”)
Or increase severity? (“antibody-dependent enhancement” was seen with one SARS vaccine candidate)
People understandably run with a mental model where you get a disease, then you’re immune, but it’s not always like that. Other human coronaviruses people get repeatedly, and if I had to bet, I’m betting we’ll see that in some of the asymptomatic and mild cases.
The data I saw said that people could get re-infected soon after being diagnosed with covid-19, but that it was virtually always asymptomatic. That was like two weeks ago, which is practically an eternity in this thing, so it could already be disproven or have questions about it.
The question I keep asking is your second question: If you are reinfected and asymptomatic, are you contagious? If you have any research on that I’d love to know, because I’ve been searching high and low for an answer and have nothing.
Not directly answering your question, but a recent study in China reported that peak infectivity occurred in the two days before symptoms appeared:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5
An antibody titer does not equal protection from infection. No one has yet demonstrated that. Everybody with HIV has an antibody titer and none are protective. Don’t jump to any conclusions.
FWIW, the orange guy wasn’t telling people to drink or inject cleaners but rather speaking of medical researchers looking for something that would work that way; to clear the virus load the way cleansers clean hard surfaces.
As if they weren’t already doing that.
So yes, it was a silly metaphor but *not* as silly as the media presents it.
Try the transcript…if you can stand the rambling.
I am re-reading the transcript now, and it sounds like–if you can follow it, which is hard–he might be suggesting that we could inject ultraviolet light inside the body *like* a disinfectant, which is another example of “this is not the best defense possible.”
But the more I re-read that section, the more I think that he didn’t “mean” anything in a literal sense. He’s just trying to convince the public that a miracle cure can be developed, and he’s free associating words in lieu of actually constructing sentences that “mean” something. That part where he talks about injecting disinfectant into the lungs is the most coherent thing he says for about 30 seconds before or after, but the fact that what he said had meaning was more of an accident than anything else.
But again, the argument is that he is so incoherent that he merely sounded like he was suggesting you could cure COVID-19 by injecting lysol into your lungs, rather than what he was actually suggesting, that’s not much of a defense.
Speaking of which, I’m of the mind that the reason everyone ran with it, aside from the fact that it is so incoherent there really were a couple sentences where it sounded like he’s talking about injecting bleach into your lungs, is that he has been pushing quick-fix drug cures for a while now. It’s not crazy to think he would do that again.
I think it’s because he’s orange.
And because he puts ketchup on steak.
The philistine!
He must be destroyed!
Trump is an illiterate, brain-dead moron. Making excuses for him is indefensible.
Fangraphs is supposed to be a community that holds up science as a way to tease out knowledge and truth by applying reason, logic and mathematics to difficult questions. Trump, like most of the Republican party, has nothing but contempt for science, facts, reason and truth. What does that tell you?
Who’s making excuses?
He does enough questionable stuff to hammer him on, so why hammer him on what he doesn’t do?
The idea is to deal with the actual facts not somebody else’s version of them.
No, don’t give Trump any excuses and don’t come here to make excuses for him, please. “Won’t somebody stand up for Trump?” is not a question you need to ask. You are not championing truth and reason by granting him the most generous possible interpretation, which he hasn’t asked for and didn’t earn. So stop. Or go work in journalism, they seem to love pretending Trump is “just saying” and we should all chill out. “Some experts” disagree that he’s a moron, you know….
The GOP must be destroyed. Let something with a shred of heart take its place.
So facts and accurate reporting doesn’t matter?
Only the masses perception?
Gotcha.
You’re a f*ggot
You’re a bigot.
mrhappy not exactly living up to his handle.
Welcome to banville, champ.
No. Others on the stage had just gotten done with presenting research about how cleaning supplies helped kill the virus on surfaces in lab conditions. When he picked right up talking about cleaning supplies after that, he was clearly not talking metaphorically.
Correct, he asked the researcher about finding “something like that” in the lab to kill the virus in the body. Which is what needs to happen. Nothing wrong with stating that. People interpreting that as “drink bleach” are stupid.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-usa-idUSKCN2261WJ
Trump deserves no excuses, no respect, and no quarter. His administration’s actions have probably killed five figures worth of people during this pandemic alone, with more on the way.
Our of a series of bad choices, the best course of action with this admin is…not something we’re allowed to say in public.
Too much a coward to say what that might be, huh?
No, just not an idiot, which is what you might be.