Warriors to play without fans in crowd following San Francisco order | Hacker News Reader

Warriors to play without fans in crowd following San Francisco order

espn.com

66 pointsjason_zig52 comments

Good. End crowds everywhere, right now. Do it before things get worse.

Curious, what's the end goal? And when does it end?

The short-term goal is limiting the case-load entering advanced medical care. The long-term goal is limiting the number of people who die from COVID-19.

Hopefully not here (or there): https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/merkel-coronavir...

The end goal is to mitigate and delay mass infection. It ends when the virus dies down and/or a vaccine is developed and mass produced.

So, a possibility of "never"?

It's likely that once the virus becomes endemic, it'll also be mutated to a less lethal form. Eventually, basically everyone will have had it and built up some level of (probably incomplete) immunity, so community gathering restrictions will no longer be needed to reduce load on hospitals.

As far as timeframe, probably 20-75% of the population will have had it by the end of the year. Certainly by 12 months from now. Or a vaccine or anti-viral will have been deployed.

For some, a definite never. As lovers of life, we tend to feel the fewer the better. Will populations "never" normalize whatever comes to pass? Extremely doubtful, we seem incredibly adept at amnesicly moving on.

"Never" what? You're aware that the world has had past pandemics, including one that killed 50 million people, and yet society returned to normal?

We also have influenza as an example of a possibility of "never."

Right, the flu will "never" be gone, but human society has been able to go about its business. That's why I wanted to know what the parent commenter means by "never". It seems like they were implying that society would be in a state of emergency forever because of coronavirus.

The thing to focus on is that social distancing and other measures slow the growth rate of the infection, and will limit the peak load on our medical resources.

Once we run out of ventilators (and we will if we don't start canceling everything _right now_) the fatality rate will increase substantially.

Eventually pandemics burn themselves out -- the entire susceptible population becomes infected. At that point all the mitigation becomes pointless.

The goal of doing this is to lengthen the time it takes for that to happen so we don't overflow hospitals when ever gets it at once. It could be the difference between 500k people dying over 2 years and 4 million people dying in 6 months in the US.

https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

When the number of active cases drops to zero, when basically everyone is tested and contact tracing has resolved all current active cases, when a large fraction of the population (25%-75%) already has had it, or when a vaccine or extremely good antiviral is developed and massively deployed.

I can't see any of these happening for months. To do any of them requires massive mobilization that isn't happening in the US.

Eventually COVID-19 will probably just be endemic like the seasonal flu. Hopefully it's also mutated by that point to be much less dangerous.

Alternatively, when a vaccine becomes available and we can establish herd immunity (for everyone but the anti-vaxxers of course).

Agreed, and specifically a vaccine will likely take much more than a few months so that's unlikely to be a short term fix

Wondering if they could have like 950 people in the crowd still and auction off tickets. Would be surreal, but kind of a once in a lifetime experience to be watching an NBA game, at or near courtside with so few people in attendance.

Marketing hack: buy expensive ticket, hire yeller with sign; make it onto expensive TV broadcast and go viral.

If you spread people out sufficiently, I feel like it should be fine?

Have to maintain that separation through the whole game and you still have contact transmission possible through surfaces.

Also with that tiny number of people various facility costs become prohibitive.

Happened in an MLB game a few years ago due to violence in Baltimore. Eerie video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woP3cJxVR8Y

The upcoming Bahrain Grand Prix will do the same

https://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/a31279654/2020-f1-b...

Although the Australian Grand Prix this weekend is going on as normal

Well, it is the Orioles.

Aside: How close will Astros road games be to empty this year?

I envy the broadcasters who have to bleep out all the cursing that normally is drowned out by crowd noise and arena music.

It’s the best part of sitting close to the court. So much shit talking and bravado.

It's made watching Sumo a very different experience. You can hear every breath. You can hear the swish of the bow in the ending ceremony. It has been quite interesting until Takayasu's injury today - hearing his howls of agony in a silent auditorium was heart wrenching.

You can normally hear Carmelo Anthony calling for rebounds over the crowd, music, commentators, and probably your own internal monologue, so people have had some practice.

I really want to see this used as an opportunity - not like "how can we recoup our losses by doubling the number of ads shown per game," rather "what cool things can we do with drones or cameras or mics or any other element of production now that we don't have this crowd constraint?"

I wonder if they'll receive some type of financial consideration given the loss in revenue. They aren't as good this year as in previous years but it looks like there are at least 1,000 spectators at the games most nights.

Nobody is going to be able to afford to compensate people for everything that's going to happen. Even insurance won't be able to, which is why they have the "Act of God" clauses, which I'm sure are already getting stretched and warmed up now and will be running many ultra-marathons in the months to come.

I mean, in theory, this would be a really good reason to go into deficit spending - this was unforeseeable, unnatural and preventing long term economic damage is in all of our interests - in actuality the US is too big to sanely manage such compensations and, given the current uncollectability and extreme size of the US deficit we probably don't want to try and draw any attention to it during a national crisis.

All those economic stimuluses that got dumped into stock buy backs came out of the fund that should be there to cover our asses right now.

Yup, that’s why many economists have been saying that during a good economy like we’ve had for the past ten years, we should have used the opportunity to rebuild the economic tools we rely on in case of an emergency. Instead we cut taxes and cut interest rates, so now there’s no room in the economy to recover this time.

It could end up being nothing... or it could end up being the worst economic crisis we’ve ever seen. And if it’s the latter, we have no way to defend against it. The coffers are empty.

In fact, a lot of sane and balanced economists are saying that, while the corona virus certainly incited the latest market downturn, that downturn is going to continue since the market has been highly over-valued recently. So yea, I am concerned and not putting anything into the market right now.

A little more clarifying, but theres at least 18,000~ fans per Warriors home game, lots of money to be lost ($140~/fan). - http://www.espn.com/nba/attendance https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristidosh/2018/09/30/measuring...

I actually wonder whether they will consider selling 500 very expensive tickets.

Not sure about the NBA, but in the MLB, the league enforces a certain amount of revenue sharing between teams as an attempt to even things out: https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Revenue_sharing

Of course, this doesn't do much to equalize the budgets of the teams, which tend to be influenced more by how just how many billions of dollars the owner(s) have.

I wonder if they'd still be doing this if they weren't dead last place in the league.

I bet this same post in r/nba would be a joke based on this very detail.

The city of SF forced this on them with a rule against >1,000 people gathering in the same place - the team didn't want to comply as people have been asking for this for a few weeks now.

Can they go back to Oakland if they so choose? Just curious.

Probably, but how is that relevant? Fans come from all over the Bay Area.

Where does the authority come from to ban public events, forcibly quarantine individuals against their consent come from? I.e. if this went to the supreme court, would this be upheld? This is private property. From what I can tell there is little evidence that there is a large health risk to most of the population.

I'm not lawyer, but if I recall correctly, that power derives from this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_power_%28United_States_...

Less clear to me if that applies to forcible quarantine, but seems like it would definitely apply to public events.

On the point of large health risk, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that every Warriors game is a perfect vector for community spread. I'm sure the health care professionals in the Bay Area would applaud this move.

It's a Public Health Order supported by California state law.

> UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF CALIFORNIA HEALTH AND SAFETY CODE SECTIONS 101040, 101085, AND 120175, THE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE CITY AND COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO

Also it's hard to understate how devastating this virus can be if it spreads quickly. e.g. for people > 80 years old the mortality rate is 15%

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-death-age-older-...

> From what I can tell there is little evidence that there is a large health risk to most of the population.

These measures will absolutely prevent a significant number of people from dying. Does it matter if that population is not 'most' people?

Significant compared to what? By the metrics this is no different than flu season with lots of hysteria lumped on.

Just FYI - the best case scenario is a CFR of 10x the flu. All those stupid "Over 20,000 people die from the flu every year, so don't worry" posts are going to look really bad if 200,000 people die.

Smoking cigarettes is legal in California, as is splitting lanes on a motorcycle. There is risk inherent in living life.

I'm looking forward to discovering the answer. What if I hold a church service with 500 attendees. Do the police come and forcibly remove people from a private gathering? That's a clear violation of several Constitutional rights, of course.

Is this more of a "wink wink, nudge nudge" situation where corporations need government to "shut it all down" because the corporations don't want to lose face by appearing paranoid?

Even constitutional rights have limits. Free speech is limited by laws around slander/libel, and you can't incite to immediate violence. Freedom of religion doesn't mean you get an 'out' for laws that contradict your teachings (usually).

Thankfully most people aren't sociopaths so this is unlikely to get tested in the courts.

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