Stick to baseball, 7/18/20.

I didn’t write anything this week other than the review here of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing and my review of the lovely little light strategy game Walking in Burano. I will do a season preview with some picks for breakout candidates this week for subscribers to The Athletic, as well as a new game review for Paste, and a Zoom Q&A session on The Athletic’s site on Thursday at 3 pm ET. I answered reader questions on a mailbag episode of my podcast last week.

My book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is out now, just in time for Opening Day (okay, three months before, but who’s counting). You can order it anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I’ll also resume my email newsletter this week once I have some new content.

I’ll be speaking at the U.S. Army Mad Scientist Weaponized Information Virtual Conference on Tuesday at 9:30 am ET, talking about topics from The Inside Game. You can register to watch the event here.

And now, the links…

Comments

  1. Keith, the MMR link doesn’t seem to be working.

  2. I never went on Stitch’s Great Escape or Primeval Whirl, though I had opportunities to ride both. Primeval Whirl just never looked that interesting, and from what I’ve read about it, seems like I missed nothing and potentially saved myself injury. Regarding Stitch, I went on that ride’s predecessor, Alien Encounter, and absolutely hated it. Nothing but screaming because they made it completely dark (and it WAS dark), dripped water on you and had hot breath come on your neck. So when I heard they tried to make it comical with Stitch, I thought that was a terrible use of Stitch. I am surprised they bailed on Rivers of Light so soon. They want to make nighttime a thing at Animal Kingdom, and if they’re already bailing on their nighttime show after not even 2-3 years, it makes you wonder if they intend to keep the park open past dark once things are “normal” again.

    Yes, I focused on the least essential post this week because I’m a Disney fanatic and because we’ve still got 15 weeks to go and I’m not sure my sanity will last.

    • I think they’ll keep Animal Kingdom open at night. They’ve invested so much money in Pandora and that is 100% best experienced after the sun goes down. Especially with the new Avatar movie coming out next year, I bet they bend over backward to keep that place open. Maybe even a Pandora-inspired river show?

  3. I have a question regarding contact tracing, in particular how it relates to the daycare. As I understand it, the child has been attending for a number of days while infected and displaying no symptoms. The mother began experiencing symptoms, got tested, and did drop-off/pickup for three days awaiting results at which point she was confirmed to be infected. Following all this, a number of children from the day care and their family members became infected.

    Is contact tracing able to determine the exact route of transmission? Like, do they know if it came via the mother or the child? Do they know where the child became infected? Is it possible they also became infected at the daycare by a different asymptomatic child? If so, could that child be the one who spread it to the other children? Or some combination of the children bouncing it around each other?

    As a teacher myself and a parent, I’m very interested in how this all works because it seems inevitable that one of the schools or children’s programs I am connected with experience some number of infections. And knowing how accurately contact tracing can identify the route of transmission seems important. For instance, I am currently working at a summer camp. We are using a pod model to minimize contact between children who aren’t grouped together. If one of my campers tests positive, the entire group must quarantine for a minimum of 14 days. I do not know if testing all those children will be required, but it seems likely that many families will voluntarily get them tested. If any of those kids come back positive, is there a way to know definitively that they were infected at camp?

    If contact tracing has limits on its accuracy (which wouldn’t be an indictment by any means… no system is perfect), I fear that it may wrongly identify schools and day care programs as hot spots of infection when they really aren’t. That is to say, it may wrongly identify these programs as causative rather than correlative. Given how this thing seems to spread. it seems possible that you could have a class with multiple children all infected independently, but which would look like a cluster and outbreak. Can contact tracing make that determination?

    Appreciate anyone who can shed any light on this?

    • A Salty Scientist

      The main goal for contact tracing is to identify people who may have been exposed and thus should self-isolate (to help break the chain of transmission). While not perfectly precise, we can use parsimony and timing of infections to infer directionality (e.g. it’s more likely that one student gave COVID-19 to 19 other students than the alternative that 20 students each independently contracted it at roughly the same time). But it’s not clear to me that identifying how a clustered outbreak started is really giving us any more information than we already have (from a public policy perspective, not a blame and shame perspective).

    • Thanks. So in this particular scenario, the spread may not have been preventable if the asymptomatic child was the source and contracted it before the mom developed symptoms?

    • A Salty Scientist

      For that particular story, the probability that the mother was culprit is dependent on the timing of all cases. If she was symptomatic well before anyone else, it’s more likely that she had it first. I still contend though that even if this cluster happened due to unavoidably asymptomatic carriers, that does not change public policy guidelines–families should stay home if anyone is showing COVID-19 symptoms while waiting for a test result. And I fully realize that the lack of sick leave for many people puts them in untenable situations and serves as a further indictment of our social failures.

    • Oh, yes, she definitely behaved irresponsibly. As a teacher, what I’m thinking about is that we could conceivably do everything right and still experience spread. Which doesn’t in and of itself mean we shouldn’t re-open schools, but that we need a plan in place for what may be some inevitable spread within school populations.

      I also am continuing to see evidence emerge that the risk of transmission from young children (under 12 or, perhaps more accurately, pre-pubescent) is very very low. Which might also point to the mother as the source of the other infections. But it sounds like it all remains a bit of a guessing game in terms of knowing exactly how the virus is spreading. All the more reason to be extra cautious when there is any suspicion that one may be infected.

    • A Salty Scientist

      There isn’t a ton of research on child transmission, but I think *lower* is probably more accurate than *very very low* (the latest is that children under 10 transmit about half as well as adults: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article). But yes, because of pre/asymptomatic transmission it’s inevitable that there will be “no-fault” outbreaks within schools, and contract tracing will be important for minimizing further spread. And individuals should be extra cautious about staying home from work/school if presenting COVID-19 symptoms (fever and/or cough).

    • That last point is so important. At my camp, we typically give a bonus for “perfect attendance” and you don’t get paid if you’re out. It’s hourly work and most staff are high school/college kids so this incentive is needed. This year, they’re giving everyone the bonus no matter what and 1 paid sick day (over six weeks) because they don’t want anyone trying to “push through” feeling sick. They have to totally flip the incentives from “Do your best to be here everyday” to “Only come if you’re healthy.” This also involved an online screening we must fill out each day. It relies on honesty but it at least prompts you to check your temperature and think about how you’re feeling and what activities you’ve been involved in. We need a very different mindset with regards to sick days and the like than we are accustomed to in this country.

  4. Dave Bowling

    I don’t get your problem with Whale Rider being illustrated with Inuit avatars. The alternative, sourcing the art with non-native conceptuals, would be inappropriate.

    • Why use indigenous people as a theme at all? I don’t think it’s remotely necessary for this game.

  5. Keith- Is that a somewhat unfair framing of the Loeffler saga? I am no fan of hers, but asserting that there’s no room to distinguish between the rallying cry “Black Lives Matter” and the organization BLM, even while granting significant overlap, seems dishonest and unhelpful.

    • BLM, the organization, isn’t anti-Semitic or anti-Christian. The claim that BLM is anti-Semitic derives from its statements that Israel is an apartheid state, calling on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories, and supporting the BDS movement. Those are not anti-Semitic ideas; they support an oppressed minority in another part of the world. Calling them “anti-Semitic” dismisses the real substance of their positions, which we could certainly debate (e.g., is Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “genocide?”), in a way that both terminates the possibility of debate and avoids the need for Loeffler to directly engage with BLM’s other positions.

  6. A Salty Scientist

    Kelly Loeffler’s statement: The lives of each and every African American matter, and there’s no debating the fact that there is no place for racism in our country. However, I adamantly oppose the Black Lives Matter political movement, which has advocated for the defunding of police, called for the removal of Jesus from churches and the disruption of the nuclear family structure, harbored anti-Semitic views, and promoted violence and destruction across the country. I believe it is totally misaligned with the values and goals of the WNBA and the Atlanta Dream, where we support tolerance and inclusion.

    So I went onto the BLM website to break down her claims:

    1) Defund the police–they have several posts on what they mean by that, but yes, that’s an official position. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have a discussion about diverting some police resources to other professionals that are better equipped to deal with certain issues (e.g. welfare checks).

    2) Searched for Jesus, Christ, Christianity, and all I found was one post calling to boycott White corporations and support Black organizations during Christmas 2017. So that is false.

    3) On nuclear family: “We make our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” so that they can mother in private even as they participate in public justice work. We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

    Loeffler is scaremongering here.

    4) Searched for Israel, Jew(s)/Jewish, Palestine/Palestinian: nothing

    5) There is no evidence that they condone violence. Seems again like scaremongering.

    So on the whole, I think Loeffler is being dishonest about BLM’s positions and is trafficking in scaremongering and economic anxiety.