My one new piece at The Athletic this week looked at the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB draft, which is itself up in the air, although I am inclined to doubt that the draft would be completely cancelled because I think there’d be a flurry of lawsuits from players (and their advisors).
In response to many reader requests, I posted a ranking of my favorite board games for two players – some are just two-player games, some play more but work quite well for two. I have more board game content in the works for Paste, Vulture, and Ars Technica in the next few weeks as well.
My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.
And now, the links…
- Coronavirus stories first … Here’s the most aggravating thing you’ll read this week: Texas Monthly looks at anti-vaxxers so deranged they’re already trying to avoid a COVID-19 vaccine, even with mortality rates thousands of times higher for the virus than for any vaccine we have.
- Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) voted against the coronavirus relief bill because it provided sick leave to same-sex domestic partners.
- The Washington Post details how the federal government fouled up the coronavirus testing situation so badly, allowing the virus to spread much faster than it might have otherwise. The Post‘s Jennifer Rubin calls Trump’s response to the pandemic the biggest blunder in Presidential history.
- Trump said this week he didn’t know about the White House Pandemic Response Team but there’s video of him bragging about dismantling it.
- The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast looked at how the USA failed in our initial response to the virus. The short answer: Incompetence.
- STAT looks at how some other countries have been successful at beating back the pandemic.
- At least five Senators appear to have dumped stocks after a confidential hearing about how unprepared the U.S. was for the COVID-19 pandemic. Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) sold up to $1.7 million in stock even as he reassured the public we were prepared. Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of shares as well, and bought shares in Citrix, which makes software used by employees working from home.
- Italian author Igiaba Scebo writes from Rome “Dear Americans, Please Stay Inside.”
- As the Administration discusses bailing out airlines and cruise ship operators, the restaurant industry has received no response to its own pleas for financial assistance, despite employing more people and lacking the airlines’ history of massive stock buybacks and seven-figure CEO salaries.
- J. Kenji López-Alt posted a lengthy guide to food safety and coronavirus.
- Longreads: This New York Times story about fabricated sexual harassment claims against a professor at Arizona State is both fascinating and infuriating. The worst part is that the author, one of the targets of the scheme, can’t name the perpetrator, who is now free to do this again to someone else.
- The BBC has the story of a reporter who worked with an English man to try to reunite an Afghan mother with the daughter taken from her by the father when he fled to the UK as a migrant.
- An editorial in Scientific American discusses the growing problem of harassment of scientists and others who promote knowledge on social media, on topics as diverse as vaccines, climate change, evolution, and mental health treatment.
- The Trump Administration overruled the EPA and other scientists who used evidence to show that the widely-used chemical trichloroethylene is linked to fetal heart defects.
- ChefsFeed offers six tips on how you can help local restaurants try to survive the shutdown. Many are opening fundraising pages to help employees who need emergency assistance, like the wonderful 5&10 in Athens, Georgia, has.
- A member of the far-right hate group the Proud Boys ended up appointed to the city commission in Latinx-majority Fennville, Michigan, because he didn’t disclose his affiliation and the commissioners didn’t do their due diligence on his social media accounts.
- Board game news: Two Kickstarters of note this week. The first is for Holi, an area control game coming soon from Floodgate games.
- The second is for Ark: Awakening, an engine-builder with a modular board where each player has a unique faction (which sounds a bit like Root).
It surely won’t happen, but I’d hope that when the cruise ship companies come to ask for bailouts the gov says “Hey, don’t you register all your ships in Liberia and Barbados, etc, for tax avoidance purposes? Why don’t you go ask them for bailouts.”
Burr, Loeffler, Inhofe all dumped stocks directly impacted by the downturn. I know Feinstein’s husband also sold stocks but they were all related to a compa y that develops cancer treatments, not hospitality or travel industry or anything that will be related to Covid19 ( supposedly her funds are in a blind trust, but if her husband is making trades it is hard to figure out how blind it is.)
Who is the other senator?
Looks like it’s just those four, according to a Common Cause complaint filed with the DOJ and SEC. The fifth was Ron Johnson (R-WI), but it appears that his stock sales were years in the planning and not a violation of insider trading laws.
Ron Johnson (R) of Wisconsin and it looks to be related to a family business that isn’t publicly traded. It seems to have been planned for a while.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/third-gop-senator-caught-dumping-stock-before-the-market-crash-this-time-up-to-25-million-worth/
Yes, it appears that Ron Johnson’s situation is different. He’s still a giant d-bag for downplaying COVID-19, which I hope Wisconsinites remember when his term is up.
To Salty Scientist’s point:
“”I’m not denying what a nasty disease COVID-19 can be, and how it’s obviously devastating to somewhere between 1 and 3.4 percent of the population. But that means 97 to 99 percent will get through this and develop immunities and will be able to move beyond this. But we don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about. We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu…”
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/analysis/2020/03/18/coronavirus-sen-ron-johnson-says-keep-outbreak-perspective/5074145002/
While I have no tears to shed for airlines, esp vs local restaurateurs, there is one difference- Restaurants, for the most part, will likely be able to get back up & running once the crisis is past, either with the current owner re-starting it up or a new entrepreneur, esp if there is some leniency from banks (which there will be) due to the crisis. If one of Delta, United, AA, Southwest goes under, it is a hugely capital intensive industry that will be very tough to rebuild in a timely manner. To my mind, losing one of those would have a really drastic effect on the US.
Might be one of those times where we just have to hold our nose, put some conditions on airlines getting $$, etc. & keep them afloat.
I don’t view cruise ships the same way except it has the same effect on the employees as any other business closing it’s door. Feel bad for the bartenders, entertainers, food prep, etc., not for the execs.
If one of Delta, United, AA, Southwest goes under …
We’ve seen plenty of airline mergers and bankruptcies including periods where there have been multiple long established carriers filing at the same time. Restructure the debt, giving the bond holders a significant haircut and letting them essentially stand in the shoes of the equity holders. Or, worst case scenario, let some fold. It’s not like the aircraft disappear. Just like the restaurants, there will be the next generation of Herb Kelleher ready to jump in.
If — IF — there are to be bailout funds, it needs to be similar to what happened a decade ago with Fannie and Freddie where future profits went to repay (most? all of?) the bailout funds before bond holders and equity starts seeing a return on the investment that would have otherwise taken a big hit in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
You listed an article from STAT, which has some good takes. Here is another article from STAT, which I feel is a more important article:
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/
For those who don’t click, here are some of what I feel are the most important quotes from it:
“The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable.”
“Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless…As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.”
“…reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.”
“A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”
“…flattening the curve may make things worse: Instead of being overwhelmed during a short, acute phase, the health system will remain overwhelmed for a more protracted period. That’s another reason we need data about the exact level of the epidemic activity.”
In my opinion, what we are doing will only create a very long period of suffering for an extraordinary amount of people. New cases will continue, and we’ll have the country on semi-lockdown…forever?
Since we are already the elephant that has jumped over the cliff to avoid the cat, we can no longer opt for the short acute phase. So what’s left is what China did and Italy is mostly doing, which is not semi-lockdown, but complete lockdown. Enforcing complete lockdown would be very un-American, but is more than likely effective, thus rendering our lack of data meaningless by mostly ending the creation of new data. It’s ripping the band-aid off quickly, rather than pulling it off molecule by molecule, as we are doing now.
It’s like Mr. Miyagi said – it’s either karate do yes, or karate do no. Karate do guess so *squish sound*, just like grape. Right now, we are choosing guess so, and our people and economy and livelihoods are the grape.
We don’t have reliable data at this point, but we can’t wait for the reliable data to come. The decisions made can only be guided by what we have. The number of people with the disease is certainly is a lot higher than the numbers we have. I would also guess that when look back on this, the number of people who died from undetected pneumonia or some other respirartory disease could also be significantly higher than normal as well.
The article highlights something else COVID-19 has brought us; things are changing really fast. Since Monday when the article was written, we have two major US cities where the hospital systems are close to maximum capacity because of this disease. In addition to trying to prevent at risk people from dying, we are also trying to prevent the whole hospital system from being overloaded. The death rate in the US according to Johns Hopkins is about 1.2% today.
There are some large scale testing that is being done. In the small town of Vo in Italy, they tested every inhabitant (a little over 3,000) multiple times to see if they have the disease. About 3% of the population had COVID-19, with half showing no symptoms. San Miguel County in Colorado wants to do the same thing to every resident there (about 8,000) as well. It would be great if there was a way to test 300 million people multiple times as that would be the quickest way to get back to normal. I just don’t see how we could do that.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/aggressive-testing-helps-italian-town-cut-new-coronavirus-cases-to-zero-1.4205354
There are some error bars in the real case-fatality rate of COVID-19, but there’s no way it will be lower than flu considering the hospitalizations and deaths so far worldwide. The models peg it at 1%, and actual cases would have to off by an order of magnitude, which is highly doubtful considering the amount of testing in most countries. If half of the US population contracts COVID-19 at a 1% fatality rate, we’re looking at ~1.75 million deaths.
A rebuttal to Dr. Ioannidis’ contrarian take: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/18/we-know-enough-now-to-act-decisively-against-covid-19/
We’re also not considering the full costs — including loss of life — of total or near total shutdown. People WILL die because of shutdown and many more people will bear incredible costs, some of which will be measured in shortened life spans. Medical experts are just that… medical experts. Their opinion is important here but not the only one that matters. We need a balanced approach that does it’s best to weigh costs and benefits, even with incomplete data.
Sadly, we did not prepare for this… leaving ourselves with less data than we could have and reacting in the moment rather than pulling from a playbook designed for a variety of scenarios.
Our response may be killing more people than it’s saving.
Our response may be killing more people than it’s saving.
That seems extremely unlikely. The global response is an attempt to avoid crashing the world’s hospitals, which would kill many COVID-19 patients and other patients who require emergency or intensive care. I can not see how the response would kill more people than that will.
@Kazzy, I thought that it would be unlikely that a recession would cause more mortality than the estimates of a pandemic, so I sought out some studies to see if there were mortality estimates for economic downturns. I did assume that recessions would increase mortality, but apparently this has been well studied economic downturns generally decrease mortality on net (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28772108?dopt=Abstract). So I don’t think it’s fair to say that our response will kill more people than it will save. Obviously a large recession will hurt a lot of people in many different ways, so it’s fair and appropriate to talk about what’s the best response. I do think that we are facing a pandemic that if unchecked could rival the 1918 flu, so these extreme measures are appropriate in the short term to potentially save millions of lives globally.
I said “may”. It may be unlikely. It may not. I’m not saying anything definitively. But we at least need to consider it.
Cuomo is getting praised for saying, “…if it saves just one life.” Which is about as faulty logic as we can get.
We have millions of kids out of school. What is the social, emotional, and cognitive impact of that? Students with special needs may be missing much needed services. What of that? Some kids may have lost access to meals and/or are being left unattended at home. What’s that cost us?
And that’s just one area… which many folks called a “no brainer”? Was closing the schools right? Yea, probably. Was it a “no brainer”? Only if you ignored the costs.
Some states are addressing those issues. I know here in Illinois, there are day care facilities open for parents who have to go to work. Schools in poorer areas are also providing meals for kids who require that. But the costs from the hospital system from being overloaded with COVID19 patients is a lot higher. If a hospital is overflowing with COVID19 patients, where are people going to go if they have a heart attack, serious accident, or something else that requires immediate medical attention? I know the media and leaders have said the goal is to prevent deaths. My guess is this is simply more digestible than what Keith said above; preventing the hospital system from crashing. If the hospital system crashes, a lot more people will die and it won’t be just people with COVID19.
I don’t disagree with all that. My point is that stuff needed to be planned for.
I have a friend on the BOE of a large CA district. He said they couldn’t divert funds from their in-school meal program to an at-home meal program until the feds declared a state of emergency.
So while they got criticized for not closing the schools immediately — TO SAVE LIVES!!! — they had to develop a plan that required others to work on a plan so kids didn’t go hungry.
The feds seem to have F’ed this up from jump (really, before jump), leaving lower level leaders handcuffed or struggling to make plans absent information, resources, and guidance.
Again, my point isn’t open everything back up. It is simply that ANY decision has costs and benefits that cut across a variety of areas and we need to consider all that. Unfortunately, due to a willful lack of preparedness by the federal government (at Trump’s behest) all this is happening on the fly, leaving limited time for such thoughtful consideration.
In regard to the long-form fake sexual harassment claim story, isn’t it your usual position that we should almost always believe sexual harassment claims because the percentage of false reports is so low, or am I wrong and this is only a position on sexual abuse. Also, since the author of the article is a professor of creative nonfiction doesn’t that call into question the validity of if not the whole article at least many of the facts presented. I’m sorry if this comes off as a gotcha comment, that is not my intent, I’m a longtime fan and this is my first time responding to something you wrote. I just had these thoughts as I read the article and wondered if you had questions yourself while reading the article.
If you read the article, there is no actual sexual harassment claim. No actual person came forward, with a real name, to make these accusations.
since the author of the article is a professor of creative nonfiction doesn’t that call into question the validity
Not to me. It just means it’s extraordinarily well written.
disappointed you linked to Jennifer Rubin. She’s a ghoul. No need to give her page views. Would rather her be replaced by someone who isn’t wrong all the time about everything.
Klaw, do you still follow Top Chef?
I agree the article is a very compelling read, and if there is actually a j., he is abhorrent and should have paid a much higher price for his actions than it seems he did. Maybe my failing in not really understanding exactly what creative non fiction is, but am I wrong in possibly doubting the fact by fact veracity of this story if her leanings within her area of expertise tends more toward the artistic side in order to make a point.
I read a little more about creative non fiction while in the middle of this reply and I’m still not sure i understand what the constraints are regarding the truth within the genre. I may need to take a course.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my initial questions.
It’s easy to say from where I’m sitting, but I would have continued to go after J, largely because I don’t think such an unhinged and immoral individual should be allowed to teach and mentor students.
The harasser from the “New York Times story about fabricated sexual harassment claims against a professor at Arizona State” has been identified. People found some court records with his name. People in the field know who he is. I imagine he’s toast.
Given how specific some of the information in the article was, I’m not at all surprised, and I can’t help but suspect that was the author’s goal all along.