Sorry Coronabros: Major League Baseball Ain't Canceling Its Season
Marlins. I gotta give credit, at least so far, MLB has not backpedaled here.
When you play sports and you are testing players every day, people are going to test positive. It is a certainty.
When people test positive, you can’t panic and completely reverse course.
It’s not March anymore.
Every athlete who has tested positive in college or pro, have had similar results to what most under 35 year olds have.
They either never knew that had the virus or they experience it as a very mild infection. And it does not derail them at all.
It doesn’t mean that anecdotally someone you know or someone you heard of who was 30 and got the virus and didn’t have a bad outcome.
That happens when you have a huge statistical sample size. What you have to do is consider the totality of the evidence. Not random anecdotes.’
And the totality of the evidence reflects that you are going to be fine. Much like the totality of the evidence reflects that you are going to be fine if you get the flu when you are young and healthy.
Doesn’t mean you might not die. Under 24 years old, you are far more likely to die of the flu than you are of the coronavirus.
That’s why schools should be back open. That’s why the CDC said schools back open. That’s why 67,000 pediatricians said school should be back open.
The fact that you want to believe otherwise is about your fear — not the facts.
And allowing fear and emotion to govern is why Twitter has fallen apart and why our national discourse on social media doesn’t work. That’s because people want to be terrified at all times.
So you look at the data and this is not remotely complicated. Over 99.5% of all infected people — regardless of age — are fine.
Maybe up to 99.9% based on the CDC’s own data. Shutting down the economy and risking all the lives through shutting down the economy is a far more substantial long-range danger than this virus is.
There are no substantial concerns here in the long run.
Seeing everyone embrace fear-porn all the time is frankly sad. And the Coronabros community.
The King of the Coronabros, Darren Rovell, aka Karen Rovell has been making the same bad arguments for months now that sports can’t happen in the age of the coronavirus.
And there are a lot of people out there who are in media who further propagate these stories.
They never share the negative tests. But every time there is a positive test, they run straight to social media in an effort to spread it virally.
They are so afraid that every time there is a negative story, they can’t wait to share it.
My arguments are pretty straightforward: look at the actual data.
Don’t allow yourself to be overtaken by the fear-porn. You can stay inside your house and never leave again — that’s your right as an American.
But the rest of us — the people who use their brains and looking at the data — we want to get back to work. We want to get back to school. We want to get back to living our normal lives.
If you feel you can’t do it because you are too afraid, you never have to leave your house again. You can stay inside and bury yourself under the covers.
If you are rich enough, you don’t have to work for the rest of your life and you never have to go outside again.
But the idea that this is — in some way — living a life is one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard.
And the number of people in the media who are rooting for sports to not be back. Even if they claim they aren’t doing that. When you are only share negativity, your feed tells on you.
Ultimately, you see what you believe based on what you share.
And if you are sharing 99% fear-porn as many members of the media are, whatever you claim is not actually true.
You are doing the opposite of what you claim. You may not even realize it. You may not even realize what your constant sharing of fear-porn looks like to reasonable people in the country who want to get back to sports.
But the minute anything goes wrong with the Marlins, boom it’s out there.
The minute any college football team or player tests positive, boom it’s out there.
The minute there’s an NBA player testing, you know who will share it first.
When the NHL doesn’t have a single case. Or the MLS. Or the NBA. Those same people don’t ever share those stories.
They are always looking for the worst because they believe the worst about the virus. They have bought-in to the fear-porn.