COVID-19 Roundup: Watching for the Second Wave
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.
Second Wave of COVID-19 Infections
The biggest sports news of the week, affecting everything from baseball to tennis, isn’t sports-related at all. Wrapped up in some of the economic turmoil between MLB and the MLBPA is the concern of many owners over a second wave of COVID-19 derailing the playoffs. (The bigger worry is the risk that a second wave will derail a 2020 season in its entirety.) Americans have largely moved on from peak coronavirus watchfulness and cities that didn’t bear the brunt of the initial wave, such as San Antonio and Houston, are seeing new case count peaks in recent days. Even if a second wave proves not to be severe enough to cut down the 2020 season, MLB may need to re-think things like game location on the fly, meaning it’s crucial they reach an agreement on the economic issues quickly.
Commissioner Rob Manfred said on Day 1 of the draft that he was 100 percent sure that there would be baseball in 2020. This should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt, given that the commish and the owners also claim that every game plays loses them $640,000.
The NFL Officially Suspends Minicamps
In a move that was long expected, the NFL officially suspended minicamp through the end of June and extended the “virtual offseason” to June 26. Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the Titans, was optimistic about training camp opening early in July, enough so that he ended the team’s virtual offseason two weeks before the June 26 deadline.
Meanwhile, Ravens coach Jim Harbaugh is not optimistic about the feasibility of the NFL’s COVID-19 plans:
“I’ve seen all the memos on that, and to be quire honest with you, it’s impossible what they’re asking to do. Humanly impossible,” he said.
“We’re going to do everything we can do. We’re going to space, we’re going to have masks. But, you know, it’s a communication sport. We have to be able to communicate with each other in person. We have to practice.”
NBA Players Not Unanimous on Return
While the NBA has been very happy to emphasize reports that NBA players overwhelmingly favor finishing the season, not every player is on board with the current plans. ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reports that there’s a group of players who are not happy with the plan to resume the season in Orlando:
Sources: As NBA and NBPA are finalizing terms on return-to-play plan today, there’s a faction of players discussing as a group whether restarting season in the Orlando bubble is a good idea. Several dozen players participated in a conference call in last 24 hours to discuss it.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) June 10, 2020
The league’s agreement with the Players Association has focused on allowing players to be able to opt-out of playing games, even without direct medical reasons, with replacement players brought in for the players leaving.
In additional, the “Disney season” won’t be a strict quarantine as Disney staffers, who will support the NBA’s reboot in Orlando, will not be quarantined at the Disney complex. Staffers will be subject to general safety protocols such as face masks and temperature checks as agreed to in the union’s June 14 agreement with Disney.
Dr. Zachary Binney, adjunct instructor in Epidemiology at Emory University Rollins School of Public Health and sports injury epidemiology consultant, and one of two epidemiologists Tom Haberstroh spoke with, does not believe this is an insurmountable issue.
“The NBA players and staff will likely be in contact with each other a lot more than the Disney staff will be,” Binney says. “I think symptom checks would probably do enough to reduce it down to an acceptable risk level. This is not something I would have said two months ago, but we’re learning that the risk of person-to-object-to-person transmission is not a very common group. Person-to-person is a much bigger deal.”
A basketball related aside: The German Bundesliga Basketball League has an unusual and interesting approach to contact tracing for their players: using their player tracking partner, KINEXON. I don’t envision StatCast ever having the infrastructure for this kind of thing, but I appreciate creative ways to keep players healthy without spreading the disease.
People Still Like Baseball!
If for some reason you have the sense that the public isn’t pining for the return of sports, allow Monmouth University’s poll of 807 adults on the question disabuse you of that notion. It may be skewed because this isn’t March or November, but 56% of the fans who said they miss sports a lot or a little picked baseball as the sport they missed most. Baseball had the plurality among all party identifications, ideologies, age groups, and genders, and while white respondents were more likely to say they miss baseball than respondents of color, the disparity was only five percentage points (27% vs. 22%). Maybe baseball could actually find itself some new fans if it were the first of the major sports to start up in July.
What’s more, the MLB draft averaged 615,000 viewers, with draft-related engagement on social media up 21 percent from 2019. It’s not the NFL draft, but it’s good to see an increasing number of people take interest in the MLB’s future.
Blue Jays Still Planning 2020 Home
Resuming the 2020 season will require every team to navigate around a lot of obstacles, but the Blue Jays have one more. Namely, with the various Arizona-Florida-Texas plans failing to come to fruition, the Blue Jays don’t actually know yet where they could play games in 2020. The border between the United States and Canada remains closed for non-essential travel and while I personally feel that baseball is essential, I’m in the distinct minority. The current restrictions are set to expire on June 21, but are expected to be extended.
Some of the options include Toronto playing at another major league stadium, at Sahlen Field, the hometown of the team’s Triple-A affiliate Buffalo Bisons, or at the team’s spring training complex in Dunedin, Florida.
Lindor Donation Connects the Dots
Francisco Lindor, who already has a relationship with the New Balance shoe brand, made a donation of 150 pairs of shoes to hospital workers treating COVID-19 patients. It’s not the first piece of equipment people think of when they consider the needs of health care providers, but I know from my sister, who treats oncology patients, some of whom have COVID-19, that shoes get worn down and essential for hospital staff.
Why the header? There’s a little tidbit in that WKYC piece that Lindor’s favorite board game is Connect Four. Play apparently gets “intense because [he doesn’t] like losing.” For people of a certain age, it’s hard to read that sentence without thinking of the iconic 1980s commercial.
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.
Just say the baseball games are a protest against white supremacy and police brutality. Problem solved!
For the trivial unrelated comment of the day, Connect Four is a “solved game,” which means if both players play “perfectly” then you will always be able to predict who wins. Per Wikipedia, if the first player starts in the center column, the first player should always win, and if the first player starts in any of the four columns furthest away from the center (the two closest to the edge on each side) then the second player should always win. Starting in the other columns results in a draw.
Of course, most people are not that obsessed about Connect Four to play perfectly. But it is a useful and fun game for teaching problem solving and logic.
When I was a teenager with a warehouse summer job, Connect 4 was the only thing to do on our breaks. After a few weeks of playing it over and over we came to the same conclusion about how there is a solution. P.S. The next summer I got good at Spades (joker joker deuce).
ETA – The best kind of Connect 4 includes trash talking and slamming down of checkers emphatically etc.
Considering that the first wave is about to happen in the southern part of the United States, I’d say that worrying about the second wave in the fall is actually too optimistic.
Or California, for that matter, has never really stopped trending up. It’s not just a Southern thing.
https://epiforecasts.io/covid/posts/national/united-states/#regional-breakdown
I would include California and Arizona and Texas in that, yes.
“Pretty sneaky, sis’.”
From a Connect Four ad that ran when I was a kid, in the 70’s.
That’s the ad linked at the end of piece.
Now that phrase describes an entire genre of porn.
These people have been wrong about this virus literally since the beginning. Now they’ve said it doesn’t stick to surfaces hardly at all, and just last this week are saying its extremely rare to transmit it if you are asymptomatic.
They should just come out and say “we don’t have a clue”. Mask work, masks don’t work. Fauci has been flip flopping since the beginning and has destroyed more lives than the virus has.
It is depressing how many people don’t understand how science works.
its depressing to watch how many people are willing to destroy millions of lives waiting for this science to get it right one time.
Currently their are less daily deaths right now than before the stay at home order was issued. You ahve to go all the way back to march to match the levels we are at now and its trending downwards. People with the virus is trending downwards too despite with much more people getting tested now.
Yes. That’s because the stay at home order was issued, plus the 2 week lag.
This is how cause and effect works.
THen how do you explain deaths and cases trending downwards despite the rallies going on for two weeks now and several states been open for 2 weeks? Does cause and effect not work after rallies and riots and burning things down? These medical leaders need to be locked up. If I was as wrong at my job as fauci is I’d be fired. Serious question, has he been right about anything?
Deaths are Trending down!
Have you ever been right about anything?
Hi. I don’t know why you are so worked about this, but let me explain to you, in terms that you may be able to understand, how this works.
1) Coronavirus is, as the name implies, a virus. It makes you sick.
2) Coronavirus is primarily spread through airborne transmission. Someone coughs (or less commonly, sneezes) on you and they have coronavirus, it has a decent chance of infecting you. Other high-risk activities involve yelling or singing–these things expel the virus from your mouth and it could be inhaled by others (this is why, for example, an entire choir in Seattle came down with it despite standing 6 feet apart when rehearsing).
3) If everyone stays at home and limits going out in public, the people who have coronavirus (and many people don’t know they have it since it takes a while for symptoms to manifest, and still others are asymptomatic) then the infected people cannot spread the disease because they have no one to cough on (or otherwise expel a virus from their mouth onto others). It also reduces other forms of transmission, although those seem to be less of a concern.
4) Thus, cases tend to fall when people shelter in place. You usually don’t see this show up for about 2-3 weeks thanks to the lag in symptoms and reporting, and it usually starts slowly. First it plateaus, then it goes down. Deaths, unsurprisingly, take longer than that, since most people do not die of coronavirus complications immediately.
5) If you take a look at what happened in Wuhan, Italy, Spain, and New York City, this is what happened in every single situation. Really, it is what happened in every place.
6) There are a number of places that have lifted restrictions who are now experiencing increases in cases. Arizona is about to see a surge. Texas is increasing. Florida, Georgia, and both Carolinas are increasing. You’re seeing increases in California. And these are all happening despite the fact that these are sunny, hot places during a sunny, hot time of year and sunlight and heat appears to kill coronavirus pretty well.
VT’s R0 is 1.6, MI’s 1.4, AZ’s 1.3, several other states are at 1.2. I think lockdown severity is diminishing as an explanatory variable in slowing the spread since MI has had a famously severe lockdown and VT too, I believe. (Sweden, OTOH, is 10x its Scandinavian neighbors but otherwise on par with the UK, who did a late lockdown.) TheDuke mentioned that we’ll likely never do a nationwide lockdown again for more than 2 weeks. Longer local lockdowns may be warranted and we’ll definitely keep greater care on nursing homes than NY did (what a tragic clown show NY has been). Perhaps it’s premature, but there doesn’t seem to be a spike from the protest gatherings, though maybe there’s an echo coming in a week or two.
Joe Nocera wrote in Bloomberg 2 weeks ago that H3N2 killed 100k in the US in 1968, hospitals were overwhelmed, but life went on and then H3N2 fizzled out. Our hospitals now seem to be ready, the panic 2 months ago over ventilators now seems silly. Either way, epidemiologist hypocrisy over suddenly encouraging mass protests renders any further lockdown “dance” unsustainable. No one’s going to “trust the science” that’s so brazenly political.
This is so ignorant, we’d need to write a book to have any hope of convincing you you’re wrong.
If you were capable of reading a book, you’d probably have come up with a better answer. You aren’t and that’s consistent across all your replies. Go look at your favorite Coronavirus writers and come back with a better rebuttal.
gonna try again
I don’t know where you got those numbers, but they look weird. Maybe they’re outdated. Maybe they’re wrong. The estimates I’m looking at show they’re around 1 in pretty much every state right now.
Anyway, it isn’t going to happen all at once, and not everywhere. First cases will plateau, then it will start to increase slowly. What’s going to be more obvious is the acceleration of the curve.
In any case, I don’t know where you’re looking for data, but you should consider taking a look at the Johns Hopkins data.
Take a look at the states that are in red on the state increases page, and that are also increasing in the % of positive tests. That’s how you know you’re gonna have a problem, because exponential growth is a mofo.
I used Jetsy Extrano’s link above. So post the positivity rates by state.
Masks are good. Let’s just wear those and not infect seniors next time like NY did.
Yeah, it blocked my link. Sorry. If you google
All State View of Week to Week Change in Percentage of Positive Tests Johns Hopkins Coronavirus
you’ll get one. If you google
Daily confirmed new cases (3-day moving average) Johns Hopkins Coronavirus
you should get the other one.
The reason both are needed is because often more new cases are the result of more tests, not wider spread. But if both are going up that’s bad no matter how you slice it.
Arizona is in its own category right now–most likely, things are going to get bad there first. Texas, Arkansas, the Carolinas, and Alabama are worth monitoring. California and Florida too. Georgia we’re flying blind because there’s virtually no testing going on.
Yep, the past alarm about exponential growth does look silly if you successfully control it. That’s how you know you’ve done your job.
And you’re not seriously going to claim that’s unfalsifiable because there’s no way Re could have stayed up at 2, I do hope?
It’s the paradox of preparation.
It’s pretty clear that the restrictions (it’s not a lockdown compared to places like Italy or Spain, much less China) had a pretty big impact on the spread of the virus, but what’s maddening is that the United States as a whole and most individual states did not build the public health capacity needed to respond. Restrictions are supposed to only be a temporary measure, but when policymakers throw up their hands and say “it’s too hard, just let people get sick and die” there’s no real way out.
NY, NJ, CT, MA, RI, and DC combined for 57k of the 117k US deaths so far. All have over 1k deaths per 1M people. That’s a strange measure of “successfully control it.” Did lockdowns finally cause the deaths to wane or did 25% positive serological tests in their populations indicate herd immunity? Can anyone answer the q how many lives the lockdown saved over a simple regime of hygiene, masks, avoiding crowds and close contact, and not infecting nursing homes like NY did? Norway’s Public Health Ministry declared that a lockdown was unnecessary for their country.
Obviously, we didn’t know this in early March so we chose quarantine. (NY was already well-seeded, so their lockdown was too late…and bungled.) My point is that should a pandemic come to the US again, we’ll choose the simple regime over the long, severe lockdown.
so the flu incubation period before symptoms to show is 4 days to 2 weeks…but now sad trombone is saying its 2-3 weeks before you show signs of the flu because it trending against his theory. got it.
Covid census hospitalizations numbers are trending straight down and are lowest in over 14 weeks. Deaths are trending down. Thats indisputable. people testing postivie are trending down. even with states being open and rallies been going on for over 2 weeks now.
from cdc’s own website currently if you are under 49 years old…only 3.4 people out of 100,000 are in the hospital and only 1 % of those will die from it. Yall keep wearing the masks in your houses people. I’m out and about not washing hands and kind of wish someone would give it to me!!
No. No they’re not.
Can we agree that taken as whole, MLB owners are the most financially short sighted collection of ultra wealthy people? We’re talking about 10s of millions of dollars vs BILLION DOLLAR team values. And this is before looking at all the creative accounting owners do to look poorer. Heck the Mets are STILL around so you can’t pretend any MLB owner could ever go bankrupt.
Screw the owners. I’d prefer to pretend they don’t exist, that baseball is a free and unfettered children’s game. The game is beautiful and the rules are fair.
And once the older RACIST owners of the segregated days were finally suppressed the game became a wonder of inclusion.