NCAA cancels March Madness and other championships
ncaa.org
ncaa.org
However, I expect the general trend of people avoiding traveling and crowded places will have a massive effect on Vegas revenue as a whole.
Look. I have multiple friends who have already had all of their shifts canceled for the rest of March. And guess what, nothing is going to be better April 1st. Those folks don't have investment funds to sell. They don't have 401Ks to skim from early, at great cost. They don't have friends and family with money and their emergency fund wouldn't even cover the costs of HALF of a Coronavirus test, let alone a weeks worth of rent.
We need to be talking about suspending evictions, delaying mortgage payments, nationalizing health care, and more. And if you think this is over the top, go watch and read about Italy and get back to me in 2.5 weeks. I can't wait for the rest of America to understand just what a precarious and fragile system we've built.
> suspending evictions, delaying mortgage payments, nationalizing healthcare
I mean sure, I don't think I would disagree with any of that at all (good luck with the last part though, we've been trying that for 40 years), but to say that this wouldn't have a detrimental impact on the economy is a bit confusing to me...it will and that will hurt, but the idea is that it will hurt less than something like COVID running rampant or without measures to protect workers who will be hurt most by the economic fallout.
The US is flying blind with a fragmented, expensive medical system that discourages those who need care or testing from getting that care. What might save us (marginally) is that much of the country is fairly rural, and we're far less dense so the spread rate might be lower. However strictly none of the doctors I've spoken to (one of whom is an infectious disease specialist at SF General) believes we have the capacity to deal with the crisis. To a person they say that if it starts spiraling in the US it will get very bad, very fast.
By the way, those countries or areas that avoided the worst of it (Taiwan, Singapore, several provinces in China outside Wuhan, to a limited extent South Korea) have taken centralized, planned, dramatic action to do so. This is one place where central planning is probably the better choice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_hosp... [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/covid-19-testing/
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229013572_The_varia...
- What are the number of critical care beds in the hospital?
- What are the number of negative pressure rooms in the critical care unit? Negative pressure rooms help keep a contagion contained.
- Critical care rooms typically have a ventilator, but they require a critical care physician to determine the correct parameters for the vent and a respiratory therapist (RT) to set and monitor the vent
- Does the critical care physician have the appropriate personal protective clothing (PPC)? I believe the norm is some kind of suit along with an N95 mask. I'm not sure if this disease has something extra required.
Mostly, I mention this because the equation of what is necessary is complex and breakdowns in this can cause problems. For example, if there's not enough PPC, then the RT and physician can become ill, which means they can't treat patients. At least in the U.S., critical care is a fellowship on top of a residency, so you can't exactly replace them quickly. If there are not enough negative pressure rooms, then the disease can spread more easily in the hospital.
Now, that said, I don't know enough about Italy and their system to fully explain what happened there. I do know that it's not as simple as number of hospital beds, which is why I replied in the first place. This makes a direct comparison to the U.S. at best difficult.
Anyway, there's a lot of dramatically incorrect information being thrown around. There's a lot of people claiming to be physicians and saying some really hyperbolic things. I'm not happy about that, so my small contribution is to at least provide a better reference for something concrete, which is number of ICU beds in the U.S. and elsewhere within the last decade.
There also is the G-League which is essentially the NBA minor league. Anybody on the bubble of making the NBA who wants a job will get a chance in the G-League, and if they were truly NBA caliber then they'd prove themself and get the opportunity.
I'm basically trying to answer this question: Is there a player who is talented enough to play in the NBA, but won't get that chance because the NCAA tournament is cancelled. The answer is no. If the player is on the bubble they'll likely get a G-League contract and if they excel in the G-League they'll get a shot in the NBA.
If they drop from the first round to the second round, they'll still get a chance. Obviously a good tournament or bad tournament might chance draft ordering and short term compensation, but the average NBA salary is ~7 million dollars. A million dollars here and there isn't going to make a difference if the player is truly NBA caliber.
We're going to have to take special measures to make sure critical supply chains stay in tact.
Still too many people calling it a hoax and that it's no worse than a common cold.
It's like a rather bad influenza. The mortality rate is fairly low and difficult to estimate unless you test the entire population on a regular basis. It isn't like one of the outbreaks that kills 10%, 20%, 50% of the infected.
It shouldn't be ignored, but it also shouldn't be treated like a new black death. It is difficult for uninformed people to say "people are overreacting to a real threat".
That's true, but it has one characteristic that makes it very nasty: it is highly contagious before you show any symptoms. That makes it very hard to contain. So we only have two options: either try to contain it despite the difficulty, or just give up, let it spread, and essentially sacrifice 1% of the world's population. 1% is better than 10% of course, but that's still 70 million people.
The bad-case version of this isn't people dying in the streets of the virus, it's people dying needlessly (some in the streets) of preventable things because the healthcare system is completely log jammed and there are literally no more beds and no more staff available. This basically what Italy is staring at, currently.
"It's like a rather bad influenza."
In addition to all of the people it's going to kill, it will also decimate the world's intensive care resources. Many people who would otherwise die will live because they got a bed in intensive care. Conditions which complete for these ICU beds will see their fatality rate sky rocket.
It is incontrovertibly in the "serious" bucket.
It's the hallmark of being a conservative.
The upcoming Chinese GP is being rescheduled, and the first-ever Vietnam GP might also fall victim. Bahrain GP is scheduled for Mar 22, so if Australia gets canceled, Bahrain probably will too.
This is a huge and extremely expensive sport, one of the most popular and lucrative in the world, with teams shipping dozens of personnel and many tons of equipment all over the world. The logistics are a nightmare if it gets changed.
let's say many countries, companies and individuals "get used" to how we will need to live over the next weeks/months. what things that we used to take as "norms" may change, permanently, and what would the second and third order effects be?
for example, let's say travel-centric entertainment (sports, concerts etc) became more of an online experience than it already is, and WFH becomes more prevalent. now many folks with "discretionary income and time" theoretically have "extra" time and/or money. where would it go?
would we invest some of it into people and companies that are seeking to improve things for the people that don't have discretionary income/time? would we invest some of it in healthcare, biotech, etc. designed to try to prevent future similar events? or would a variant of parkinson's law just swallow it?
Seriously, it's a bit of a bummer. I had hopes that this year a non-power-conference team (Gonzaga, San Diego State, Dayton) could win it all. I know there are bigger issues to worry about, but it's still a disappointment.
Nascar is likely next.
I would actually think this would be a great time for Nascar to capitalize on other sports being suspended.
So really, what’s decided regarding eligibility will set the precedent going forward. Hopefully it won’t ever have to be referenced though.
I like to think if that term never existed then maybe society wouldn’t let universities exploit them for millions of dollars while paying them nothing.
If they play the same game but no one makes money they are free?
By the time you reaches college, you typically:
1. have enough data to see how quickly you're improving;
2. are exposed to a much wider pool of talent than you were previously. Chances are there are many people at your level of athletics that are far better than you; and
3. are exposed to a much more difficult environment than high school and middle school. Combined with 1 and 2, many athletes lose the desire to work that hard for so long.
For athletes that aren't in the upper tier of college athletics, reality has set in even earlier.
Everything is going virtual now anyway, sports might as well too. That also maintains at least some of the ad revenue and other economic activity while still greatly minimizing risk of spreading the outbreak.
There are apparently no synchronous tests (e.g. antibody tests) in the US currently. Asynchronous tests (PCR) are hard to come by, and take 3 hours to run with a 2-3 day lead time at best.
it is insane that one can get into a college with zero brain power just for being tall (and ncaa and co enable that). what possible use does society have for that long term?
What use does society have for Facebook and Twitter long term? Those are far more detrimental to society than college basketball.
Are you also against TV, movies, video games, reading fiction, etc.? God forbid people spend their money on entertainment. I'm not even a basketball fan, but I can recognize that your comment is absolutely ridiculous.
> can get into a college with zero brain power just for being tall
Basketball is a lot more than "being tall"...
This hurts a lot for some of us. I am a Creighton fan and this was our first big year in a long time, maybe our best of all time.
Sports fans get accused of forgetting "it is all a game" sometimes. It is certainly more than a game when you think of how much some people's lives depend on the money from these events, but limiting the impact of this virus is certainly not "soft".
It was also the players' choice to make their life about something that was always going to lose in priority to public health, if it ever came to that.
Will teams that finish #1 in various polls claim national titles?
Of course none of it matters that much in the long run but it is a big bummer for the athletes and fans!
Also, is it true that the great majority are as mild as the common cold? I ask just because I heard "mild" encompasses "feels like death but doesn't need hospitalization", like the kind of cold I've had perhaps twice in my life.
(Asking from the point of view of being all-in-favor of canceling large gatherings, to protect the folks that would be hit hard by the illness.)
That was already announced before the NCAA cancellation.
[1] https://www.espn.com/tennis/story/_/id/28891268/atp-suspends...