Thanks to Rose Brunner – you got me riled up again!!!! Thus, you have earned your way into the blog (along with other innocents)!!!!
We all know that I am passionate about the tournament, and thus, while I understand the concerns, I so badly want the games to be played with the fans, the cheering, the insanity. So, lets travel back in time to around 5:15 pm.
Here I was, innocently at work trying to get a couple more things done for my current project before heading home for the evening. And sure enough, I hear my phone beep with a text. Before I even have time to check, I hear my phone beep again – I thought it was just my phone telling me I was too slow. But no. My wonderful wife Elizabeth and Dave Zimmerman, my roommate from college text me the same breaking news – that the NCAA has announced the tournament will be played with no fans.
Seriously – it isn’t enough that I am turned into a crazy person during March. But the NCAA couldn’t wait a couple hours until I was home from work to announce this. They couldn’t announce it at lunch time when I could find out and get it out of my system. No – they had to announce it while I was trying to finish something before I go home. Now, here I am trying to be productive and all I can think about is basketball and sadly, the coronavirus.
Rose then came by to ask me a question, and of course, this means I have to drag her into my madness….. How can i concentrate if I don’t get things off my chest. Because this is completely unprecedented that the basketball tournament would be played without fans. And it feels like panic.
And I get that this is a new virus causing people to be scared. We don’t know how fatal it really is – partially because it is so much like a common flu or virus that people don’t report it. We don’t know how bad it can get because with it being new, people do not have built-up immunities to it. It is believed to have a mortality rate higher than the common flu, and so if it really ramps up, it could be bad and too late to stop. People are scared because the media is 24/7 on this story telling us how bad it is.
Anyways, I finally got to the point where I realized that it was late and my chances of productivity were done. I am so distracted that I might as well go home. I decide to go home, write my blog post to get this off my mind and go get dinner – since Elizabeth and the kids were coming home from Charlie’s Rubik’s Cube tournament (Charlie and his school did great!). I even enjoyed a little of the Minnesota / Northwestern game.
And then I get a text. Rose needed to get me going again – and so she sent me this link:
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-disease-2019-vs-the-flu
And now I am all riled up again!!!!!! Because the article made one of my points from yesterday a little big more concrete (I will round some numbers – since all of you can obviously read the article that Rose found on this)…….
The coronavirus has a little over 120K cases world-wide, resulting in over 4K deaths. In the US, there are 1K cases resulting in 29 deaths.
The flu has an estimated 1 billion cases world-wide, resulting in over 291K deaths per year. In the US, they estimate over 9 million cases resulting in over 12K deaths.
Every death is a tragedy – so do not take this as me saying not to worry about the coronavirus. But we have not closed major sporting events like the NCAA Tournament for a virus that is highly contagious that ends in death for 291K people per year. But 4K deaths get caused by a new virus and we need to shut everything down (not just the NCAA Tournament) for the first time in history. I get that the flu is the danger that we know, and the coronavirus is the danger that we do not know. But there have been many dangerous diseases through the years, and I don’t ever remember this type of reaction.
Maybe it is the right decision to make – for the first time in history, instead of letting this spread, we are going to slow it down by not allowing large amounts of people to gather in the same place. Maybe this will actually reduce the other viruses from spreading as well. But the pessimist in me says that unless we all plan to lock ourselves in our homes for the next 2 months, all the viruses (coronavirus, flu, name your contagious disease) are going to continue to spread and people will continue to get sick – and tragedies will happen.
Thank you, Rose, for sending me this information and getting me riled up again. Hopefully, this will get it out of my system so that I can focus back on bringing all of you pointless commentary about actual basketball. I should be pulling box scores from the NCAA website. I should be looking at NET rankings and team sheets figuring out the bubble. I should be watching basketball games. I should be thinking about building a quick and dirty model to predict the games that I will eventually not use because I won’t believe that School A will beat School B. I should be sleeping so that I am not a total wreck next week. I shouldn’t be reading articles about mortality rates, causes, treatments and prevention of diseases.
Oh – congratulations to Boston University – who managed to hang on at the end of the game to upset regular season champion Colgate 64-61 to claim the Patriot Conference Championship! There, that feels better. Basketball results to discuss.
Oh – and just to be on the safe side. Please everyone – wash your hands!!!!!!!!