RE: 99 Percent of FBS ADs Believe We’ll Have College Football This Season
Note that the post subject line is not accurate: that poll says that 85% of FBS AD's believe that we'll have college football this season, with 99% believing we will have college football sometime this school year.
I think the first is rather optimistic, but the latter much less so ... organizing an eight game conference schedule in the Spring would not be a surprising outcome.
If, according to epidemiologist Sam Scorpino, this is a disease that is about ten times deadlier than influenza, so if 10,000 to 80,000 die per year from influenza, that projects to 100,000 to 800,000 deaths. However, obviously at the upper end of that the mortality rate increases due to the hospital system being overwhelmed ... so if the simple projection is updated to take that into account, that is more like 100,000 to over a million.
There was a projection of 60,000 deaths over a week back, but that was based on best case policy conditions which obviously are not in place ... lockdown until a national testing and tracing program is underway, FEMA not impounding hospital bound protective gear so they can be sold to those hospitals at a higher price, etc. ... with the current death toll at 44,000, 60,000 simply is not going to happen.
And of course, this is not the flu, so there isn't any built in "natural" summer slowdown in the epidemic. The R0 for a flu is around 1.4, given all the partial immunity in place, and that depends a lot on children for keeping the spread up, as the ongoing evolution of flu strains means that older people on average have more partial immunity built up against the current strain, so when school lets out for summer, even fairly novel flu strains slow down their spread until school reopens in fall.
But a disease with an R0 of 2.5 that doesn't rely on kids passing the disease around at school could see it's rate of transmission drop to 2.0 if conditions in summer are not as ideal for its spread, and still experience explosive growth in a state that has too many people who believe the "it's like a flu" storyline and press for premature opening.
It may be that the closures in Ohio and Michigan were early enough that if there is enough test and tracing capacity, most MAC schools can have "hybrid" online/FTF classes in the fall with students on campus by October ... and the MAC can get a system up for testing of student athletes that allows a shortened Fall conference season to take place, with pre-season training in September and a conference schedule in October/November.
And if it falls short, transplanting that to the Spring is not likely to be an insurmountable task.
But Kent State in in late September at Alabama? That'd be massively optimistic.
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