Re: Pre game preamble: AFL 2020 Rd 6: Carlton vs ???
Reply #21 –
Its inevitable. You can't hide forever. This virus was always going to take hold eventually. All we did was kick the can down the road. Where I get concerned is that we are doing it again on the back of some very minute numbers. Onve we were in 100 hospitalisation territory id understand but currently we have all of 30 people admitted.
Thats barely one ward across the state.
Firstly, I'm posting this in this thread because we are discussing the risks to opening games to the public, ours being one of them.
The growth of COVID-19 can be exponential Thry, the medical specialists know R0 is not yet clearly defined for COVID-19 and sits somewhere well above 1.0. Influenza R0 is typically 1.2 to 1.6, and COVID-19 might be above 2.0.
btw., For those not familiar, when you hear discussions that COVID-19 is 5x more infectious than Flu, you do not need the R0 value to be 5x the Influenza R0 for that to be true. For example growth rates under five cycles of infection;
Influenza (R0 = 1.6) = 1.61.6 = 2.61.6 = 5.01.6 = 111.6 = 48
COVID-19 (R0 = 2.0) = 22 = 42 = 162 = 2562 = 65536
Such a small change in R0 from 1.6 to 2.0 and the thing is out of control. You can understand why the medical specialists are so edgy about letting the reigns loose, keeping in mind they do not know what R0 really is but from the history of cases so far R0 for COVID-19 is higher than R0 for Influenza.
Now keep in mind, these cycles seem to be taking at least 14 days, maybe longer to surface, five cycles is almost two months and if we were out of lock down the result could be catastrophic for hospitals in a time frame impossible for them to deal with.
Maybe the 14 days is not a useful figure for the number of days an infection takes to get hold, it looks like the real world figure could 21 to 28 days. In some respect they won't bother looking for latency beyond 14 days because that makes all sorts of things untenable, contact tracing for example becomes almost impossible beyond about 14 days, so instead they'll look to further refine R0 to get some idea of rates. Finding a better R0 is neither a cure or a prophylactic, but it tells them how long and aggressive they need to be in the planning.
Now what does all this mean for AFL. It means it's a completely unacceptable risk to allow patrons into games. Because if we get a brace of infections to players as a result of public exposure the season is over for everybody. There will be no way to differentiate those potentially infected from those exposed but not infected within the 14 day window, the 14 days is completely arbitrary and has more to do with what the public will accept as an isolation period rather than a valid quarantine period.