caulfield12

I have 70-100 students in 4/5 classes per week and it has been getting increasingly worse...yesterday, the delays and echoes and getting logged off and then having to log back on. Nearly all Grade 1 - Graduate School has online classes right now in Wuhan. Even elementary has two hours per day, with three hours of homework that has to be checked and returned to parents each afternoon/evening. Imagine the joys of supervising those younger kids, working, and taking care of elderly parents/grandparents simultaneously. Never seen millions of people so desperate to go “back to work,” lol.

Our biggest problem is the large number of students who can’t return to Australia to start new school years after summer vacation. Two week quarantines, but flights were shut down, so they have to fly to a third country...wait it out...then hope thst country doesn’t end up with restrictions. We’re now five full weeks into online classes. IELTS, SAT (Hong Kong) and TOEFL all cancelled since January. IB, AP, A-Levels/CIE all have their yearly external exams starting the first week of May...and they’ll be lucky to have 3-4 weeks of real class time/revision, assuming we can get back in early April. Many gap year or repeats possible. 40% of our teachers are still stuck or trapped in UK, Thailand, Vietnam, US...facing the likelihood of their own two week quarantines upon return to China. Looks like flights into Wuhan could resume on March 28th/29th. Public transportation and most workers back next Friday, the 20th. They will have been working from home/online for almost 2 months. I’m sure the government will have mandatory weekend makeup days for the rest of the year...shorter holidays...even though my wife has been averaging 10-12 hours per day, no weekends off, she even got a text message from her boss at 2 a.m. last night.

Except there was MUCH more compelling advance warning in this case... If you go back and watch Inside Job, there were definitely a few prominent canaries in the coal mine in the banking, finance and regulatory fields in 2006-07...but this has been a blaring headline in the world media since the middle of January. Assuming that closing off travel between the two countries would suffice to contain it...and now simply reacting, instead of taking a more serious/measure proactive response when we had 4-6 weeks to get out ahead of this, not much that can be done about it now. Additionally, we probably don’t have too many NATO allies singing our praises tonight. More like the Reverse or Anti-Marshall Plan.

In China, they were threatening the death penalty or at least 20-30 years in jail for having the virus and intentionally spitting at or coughing on someone. Basically, attempted murder or at least manslaughter. It happened on a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Pudong/Shanghai this past Friday, where a Chinese passenger flipped out and starting coughing on flight attendants just to get off the plane after being stuck waiting to deplane for seven hours. Right behind Gobert is Congressman Gaetz from FL, wearing the gas mask into the House to make light of the “hysteria.” That’s not aging well, especially if he tests positive and has spread it to the President and other Cabinet members while on Air Force One.

You can keep pitchers in extended spring trying to simulate ramping up of workloads...but not sure for how long. Otherwise, you’re going to see the same results as those free agents waiting until midseason to sign, which has been historically pretty abysmal. Then you have service time issues, contract incentives based on 162 game seasons... All that said, containing the spread has to take precedence...but mitigation is more correct, because it’s hard to imagine testing catching up with the rapid spread at this point in time.

Did they confirm Gary Sanchez?

And Rita Wilson...seemingly, situation in Australia is a lot calmer, unless you need toilet paper.

Down now below 23,000 in after hours/extended trading...another 600 points down.

Emmanuel Mudiay is sick as well...not sure if it’s related to Gobert, but wouldn’t be a shocker.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-cancel-everything/607675/ I think this article might already have been cited...but it’s definitely worth revisiting.

That’s just not practical with too many time changes/jet lag... OKC basketball game cancelled tonight by NBA.

https://sports.yahoo.com/jazz-thunder-rudy-gobert-ruled-questionable-days-after-touching-mics-to-make-a-point-about-coronavirus-201553536.html GS Warriors also going to no-fan home games, at least temporarily.

I’m assuming that policy is for American/US-based students....but yeah, the same thing happened here in China, unless you were still awake at 2:00 a.m. on morning of January 23rd, you would have had no clue that the entire province was going to be locked down at 10 a.m. the following morning for what will likely be at least two month’s duration.

Just heard from one of my former Chinese students at Duke that all international students are being allowed to remain in dorms/on campus for the immediately foreseeable future. Hoping that all US schools will adopt similar policies...

How this plays out with political rallies the next 3-4 months will be fascinating. Eight months before the election, that will have huge/unforeseen consequences. Candidates will have to adapt to live-streaming...social media and traditional forms of media (t.v., radio, newspaper) will receive more emphasis. Uncharted waters. With the massive cancellations around the country rolling in, the legal responsibilities for going ahead with them despite all the warnings...I’ll just go back to 1918 and the Spanish flu. Philadelphia not cancelling public events for a couple of weeks and St. Louis being more proactive led to a differential of 12,000 vs. 1,800 deaths at that time. Likewise, here in Wuhan, we witnessed the mayor giving the go-ahead for a 40000 attendee Chinese New Year’s celebration with 12000+ shared dishes (at circular tables where everyone takes food from the same pots) on January 18th, five days before the city lockdown. They wanted to present an image of economic vitality and set a world record...this was weeks after the national government in Beijing was notified of a SARs-like pneumonia spreading. That decision alone will cost hundreds of thousands of lives across the globe.

Maybe that will actually help Iowa in the Big Ten tournament...because bringing back Alford to coach those games might be the only other solution. I jest. The experience of watching from home and buzzer beaters going off in empty arenas, it’s going to be surreal...you’ll definitely see so much more focus on the coaches and bench with no bands, obligatory end of game crying fans shots, cheer squads, etc.

https://www.policygenius.com/life-insurance/does-life-insurance-cover-coronavirus/

Two quick points. 133 million Americans are reported to have underlying conditions, or roughly 40% of the US population. One of the major lessons here in China was the high percentage of smokers (and it's still a majority of the population of males over 50 here) had staggeringly negative outcomes throughout this...and how much unrecoverable damage it does to the lungs, even to those who end up surviving it through emergency interventions and therapeutics/HIV-family drugs more commonly known as antiretrovirals.

Isn’t there a clause that kicks in with lots of insurance world-wide that kicks in when a pandemic has officially been declared by the WHO? CNN did it 2-3 days earlier, obviously that declaration wouldn’t be legally enforceable. Figuring out a new schedule when you have the split of teams you do between AZ and FL is a logistical nightmare...not to mention the pitchers in AZ are going to put up lopsided numbers on the negative side of the ledger. Detroit and Minnesota would have to play against each other almost every week? The biggest stadiums down there are around 10-12,000....like just a few AAA parks?

Seattle and Santa Clara, CA....already took those decisions away from the individual teams and MLB by capping the size of any event. Boston, LA, NYC and the DC area (enhanced risk to continuity of power) could easily be next the way things are trending. In NYC, one lawyer, age 50, spread it to roughly 50 members of his synagogue. At any rate, let’s wait and see what happens with the First Four in Dayton early next week. Master’s must be nervous as well. Talking about Olympics being delayed or moved back 1-2 years, comments that were quickly disavowed in Japan, that has political reasons to undertest there as well to suppress numbers and scare intl athletic community.

The beverage company must not like most major news networks sticking with coronavirus over Covid-19.

From ft.com That’s just ICU. Not necessarily counting severe/recovering but still requiring daily hospitalization before release. By Tuesday, the first day of a nationwide clampdown on travel and social contact, the total number of infections across Italy had increased to 10,149 from 4,636 on Friday. While about one in 10 have since recovered — and at least 631 people have died — 877 patients are currently in intensive care. Lombardy, which has one of the best-resourced regional health systems in Italy, has been facing a surge in acute cases. As of Tuesday the number of people infected in Italy’s industrial heart had risen to 5,791, including 446 in intensive care. “Franky, I don’t know for how long the health system can cope, I don’t even want to think about how it could end,” Massimo Galli, head of the department for infectious diseases at the Sacco Hospital in Milan, told the Financial Times. “We are holding up, but other hospitals are much worse off than us and it is a fact that we will come increasingly under pressure.”

And they’re a nationalized healthcare system where all the costs to patients are basically subsidized. We’ve gone away from more treatment-oriented to high-tech diagnostic, basically, get them in and out as quickly as possible, convert to outpatient status. That won’t work at all with coronavirus...it’s going to be a high stress, staff and bed-intensive process requiring multiple weeks for a single patient.

Baseball related discussion...unless you guys want to continue in SLAM Covid-13 dedicated thread. It’s an interesting topic, but hard to separate baseball from political considerations these days.

Fixed.....three options. Maybe I’m already anticipating the option we’d all like to see is off the table by then. The new ballpark in Texas is supposed to open with an exhibition game on Monday, the 23rd.