Photo: Marjorie Elzey
Editorial note: PSP encourages all readers to take all reasonable precautions in order to slow the spread of coronavirus in our communities.
Union & MLS
The 2020 Major League Soccer season is suspended for 30 days.
U.S. Soccer
U.S. Soccer President Carlos Cordeiro resigned last night in the face of overwhelmingly negative reaction by players, fans, and sponsors to arguments made in recent legal filings made by the USSF. Cindy Parlow Cone, a former star for the USWNT, takes over as president.
World
The Premier League announced last night that this weekend’s fixtures would go on as scheduled. About an hour later, Arsenal announced that manager Mikel Arteta had tested positive for the coronavirus and that the club would go into self-isolation. This morning, the Premier League did the sensible thing and postponed all fixtures until April 3.
The Champions League and Europa League are also postponed until further notice.
Ligue 1 and 2 are postponed in France, while the Bundesliga is set to go forward without fans this weekend.
Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp wrote a characteristically thoughtful letter to his club’s supporters.
The Union sent out a letter to season ticket holders this morning stating:
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“Yesterday, MLS announced they will suspend the season for 30 days due to the current Corona Virus outbreak. As of now, the plan is to reschedule those games for a different date later in the season. Once the home games (originally scheduled for 3/14 and 3/22) have a new date, we will make sure you are aware, and your tickets will still be valid for those games on the new dates. If you can no longer make that date, you will have the ability to exchange your season tickets for additional tickets to a game that you can make (identical to your exchange program).”
That’s pretty reassuring.
If the suspension ends after 30 days, eight MLS clubs will have to reschedule four games (the Union is one of the eight), sixteen will have to reschedule three, and two will have to reschedule two.
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What is not yet entirely clear to me is how public safety and health will be better off in 30 days. I understand that emergency production of testing materials and and sanitation products will go forward. And I am assuming that deep cleaning procedures for public venues can be developed tested and modified.
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But the disease vector is present. It is not so lethal as to kill every last one of its potential hosts and therefore commit suicide. Are there mathematical models of other disease vectors with these characteristics that say 30 days is the right number?
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Or would it have been more accurate to say — as USL’s announcement did — “at least 30 days,” with the clear message that the suspension could go on indefinitely?
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Viruses evolve. So do pandemics.
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And pandemics, if you take a long enough view, the is a fundamental underlying patter to the behavior of any disease vector. Pandemic becomes epidemic becomes endemic. That evolutionary process slowly builds up immunities within the host population. But we are speaking of decades and centuries for such processes.
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And our understandings of these matters are handicapped by the fact that we have useful data only for the last century or two. Before that we have only qualitative descriptions and inferred possibie statistics.
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There is little argument that the introduction of Old World diseases so=called into the New World after Columbus was a devastating event. [Read the accounts of how Hernan Cortes escaped being trapped in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City more or less) in 1520. He overcame odds that should have annihilated him in spite of all his other advantages because the /Aztecs had absolutely no resistance whatsoever to smallpox.
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The other historical tidbit that comes to mind reinforces the value of isolation. The Black Death comes out of China in the 13010s and 1320s and crosses the central asian steppes to the Crimea by the early 1340s. It works its way through Europe and finally into the Baltic where it laid waste to the Russian city of Novgorod.
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But the Black Death never reached Moscow. Isolation is an effective tool. And back then there was nothing else.
I am not a medical professional, but if I am understanding what I read,this virus is like our current flu strain. It is also susceptible to heat. So if you like hot drinks they will help flush it from your throat.
I believe that the 30 day time period is to help warmer weather kill off the virus.
Where have you read this? From the scientists I’ve listened to, none of that has any truth to it. Please cite sources otherwise it’s worse than hearsay.
No real sources. Sorry its was on a news feed or something. Don’t mean to pass along bad info. We have enough of that. I’ll not post on this subject again.
This virus is not a flu virus and people who recover can have lasting lung damage. With an incubation of 5 to 14 days, it can be very, very transmisible. Also, it is a neck down lung virus as opposed to a sore throat type neck up virus.
In this space, we should talk soccer 99 % of the time . Medicine and politics will not make it here, I think.