COVID-19

[King Colby]

Yet the NHL finished a tournament without an issue

I'm not sure you can compare since the NHL playoffs took place in a complete bubble.

Why? The study wants to show how hockey affects Covid. Not how their bubble format affects it.

Nobody had it in the bubble for them to see how it spread. It has to be there for it to be studied. Kinda crazy how my sport is the covid superspreader!

[King Colby]

Hey, is that bad news for non-bubble hockey?

[nocera]

Yet the NHL finished a tournament without an issue

I'm not sure you can compare since the NHL playoffs took place in a complete bubble.

Why? The study wants to show how hockey affects Covid. Not how their bubble format affects it.

Well in the NHL, everybody was tested and locked down, even the hotel employees. There was no way that virus was ever getting in. In youth or beer leagues, that's obviously not the case. So when someone comes in who is infected, it will spread. The question is why is it spreading more in hockey than other sports.

[King Colby]

Is there any way to read wapo without subscription? Richie incognito mode aint workin

[DigitalGypsy66]

Is there any way to read wapo without subscription? Richie incognito mode aint workin

Bezos certainly got the paywall firing when he took over.

Which article do you need?

[King Colby]

Is there any way to read wapo without subscription? Richie incognito mode aint workin

Bezos certainly got the paywall firing when he took over.

Which article do you need?

Was trying to read that hockey one

[AuthorTony]

You're ALL dooooooomed

[DigitalGypsy66]

Is there any way to read wapo without subscription? Richie incognito mode aint workin

Bezos certainly got the paywall firing when he took over.

Which article do you need?

Was trying to read that hockey one

Sorry, missed the article last page (and it wasn't paywalled for me for some reason)

When a youth hockey coach in Texas died in August from the coronavirus, Steve Bellemore hoped it was just a chance tragedy. Then the winter season began, and outbreaks linked to the sport exploded.

Massachusetts logged more than 100 youth hockey cases in a few weeks. In Maine, an asymptomatic referee exposed up to 400 people in two days. In Bellemore’s home state of New Hampshire, state officials shut down youth hockey for two weeks to get cases under control and mandated testing for all 20,000 players — a directive that resulted in long lines and other chaos at testing centers statewide.

“Whole hockey teams are getting quarantined,” said Bellemore, a hockey parent, coach and president of the Manchester Youth Regional Hockey Association. “It’s getting very real.”

State officials and other authorities have been scrambling to mitigate the damage: On Nov. 12, seven governors in the Northeast banded together to ban all interstate youth hockey until at least the end of the year. The following week, health officials in Minnesota, where hockey is associated with the most clusters of any youth sport, put all sports on “pause” for four weeks. Many others have imposed new restrictions and safety measures on the game.

Youth sports — soccer, basketball, cross-country, swimming, whether held indoors or out, a source of American pride, prestige and bonding — were among the first gatherings to be allowed post-lockdown. Organizers worked closely with public health officials to make modifications that balance safety with maintaining the spirit of the games. This has worked to some extent.

While public health officials suspect off-field interactions may be contributing to community spread, there’s little hard data. In most areas, there have been few to no documented outbreaks, much less superspreader events.

Ice hockey is an anomaly. Scientists are studying hockey-related outbreaks hoping to find clues about the ideal conditions in which the coronavirus thrives — and how to stop it. Experts speculate that ice rinks may trap the virus around head level in a rink that, by design, restricts airflow, temperature and humidity.

The hockey-related cases have been especially striking, epidemiologists have said, because clubs followed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention limits on gathering size and had numerous social distancing measures in place. In retrospect, one mistake by some clubs was that until recently masks had been required on ice for only the two players doing the initial faceoff for the puck — although many players wore clear face shields, which theoretically should have a similar effect.

Why health officials are terrified of a pandemic Christmas

“We’re watching hockey very carefully because it’s the first major sport that’s been played indoors predominantly and also during the winter months,” said Ryan Demmer, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health.

Demmer said the cases provide some of the first real-world evidence to support early theories about the importance of how people breathe, ventilation, and the social dimensions of transmission.

The Manchester Flames, an under-16 hockey team, practices at the JFK Memorial Coliseum in Manchester, N.H., last month. Experts say continuous sprinting in the sport leads to heavier breathing, resulting in more particles being exhaled and inhaled. (Adam Glanzman for The Washington Post)
The Manchester Flames, an under-16 hockey team, practices at the JFK Memorial Coliseum in Manchester, N.H., last month. Experts say continuous sprinting in the sport leads to heavier breathing, resulting in more particles being exhaled and inhaled. (Adam Glanzman for The Washington Post)
One critical way hockey differs from other contact team sports is how players do line changes — substitutions of groups of players — and are expected to sprint for nearly the whole time they are on the ice. Experts say it probably leads to heavier breathing, resulting in more particles being exhaled and inhaled.

Jose-Luis Jimenez, an air engineer at the University of Colorado, speculated that the spaces occupied by rinks keep the virus suspended, perhaps six to nine feet, just above the ice. Similar outbreaks have been documented in other chilly venues — meat processing factories and at a curling match earlier in the pandemic.

“I suspect the air is stratified,” he said. “Much like in a cold winter night, you have these inversions where the cold air with the virus which is heavier stays closer to the ground. That gives players many more chances to breathe it in.”

Timothy McDonald, public health director in Needham, Mass., said we should not rule out the way kids socialize — in locker rooms, carpools and postgame gatherings — as potential contributing factors. By late October, his area had seen at least six coronavirus cases related to sports clusters that span a wide range of ages, from fifth-graders to high school sophomores. He said some of those children played on multiple sports teams, including hockey.

After telling more than 800 athletes and coaches to quarantine, a county halts youth sports

“We’ve seen a lot of people mingling after the game or having discussions and parents talking and letting kids play around after the game,” he said. “There’s no way to tell from our perspective whether it’s on the ice — or waiting for 10 or 15 minutes while everyone talks after the game.”

Many unknowns
Elias Bernstein Intermediate School 7 in Staten Island closed last month until further notice. While coronavirus cases are soaring among those 18 and younger, some believe that neighborhood get-togethers, youth sports and other activities are contributing factors. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg News)
Elias Bernstein Intermediate School 7 in Staten Island closed last month until further notice. While coronavirus cases are soaring among those 18 and younger, some believe that neighborhood get-togethers, youth sports and other activities are contributing factors. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg News)
When schools shut down in March, there was huge confusion about the extent to which could get the virus and transmit it to others. Today, cases among those younger than 18 are soaring. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported last week that more than 1.3 million children had tested positive for coronavirus during the pandemic. Nearly 154,000 children tested positive from Nov. 19 to 26.

Epidemiologists are uncertain where most of these transmissions are occurring, but early reports from the United States, bolstered by more robust data from Europe and Asia, suggest they are unlikely to be related to school. Emily Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University who has been tracking coronavirus outbreaks in schools, and others say they believe informal neighborhood get-togethers, youth sports and other activities may be contributing.

Rhode Island, for example, has reported that virtual-only learners are being infected at similar rates as those attending in-person school. Oster said infection rates seem to be going up nationwide, “whether schools are open or not."

This state is shutting bars and gyms as the coronavirus surges — but not schools

Joseph Allen, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said he believes it was a mistake for school sports to shut down, because kids need physical activity, and some for-profit businesses filling the gaps may be operating in a way where “controls may not be as stringent.”

“Not having sports in schools ultimately leads to wider contact networks for many kids,” he explained.

David Rubin, director of the PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the “disease reservoir was lower” related to children in the early fall, suggesting that sports played at that time — namely, soccer — weren’t contributing much to spread. “We saw very little transmission on the field of play,” he said.

“In winter sports, you now add the indoor element. And I think there’s a fair amount of concern that hockey certainly has transmission around the game,” he said.

A PolicyLab blog post last month recommended that if youth sports leagues want to preserve any opportunity to keep playing, they need to enact mandates that strictly curtail all off-field interaction. Even then, “the potential for on-field spread may be too overwhelming to continue safely with team competition during periods of widespread community transmission, and may need to be sacrificed to preserve in-school learning options, at least until early spring or transmission rates decrease substantially.”

When children’s sports started up again this summer, tensions flared among health officials, sports providers and families over which safety measures were necessary and which were over the top. In the pandemic world, soccer was sometimes played seven-on-seven instead of 11-on-11, and with kick-ins instead of throw-ins; basketball with every other spot in free-throw lineups empty; swim practices with some kids starting in the middle of lanes to ensure adequate spacing; cross-country with runners racing in small flights to minimize interactions.

But these modifications sent some families “jurisdiction shopping” to find places that allowed games to proceed as they had before the virus outbreak, and this was a part of what happened with hockey in New England.

Hockey culture
A member of the Manchester Flames, an under-16 hockey team, wears a protective face mask while talking to a teammate during practice at the JFK Memorial Coliseum in Manchester, N.H. (Adam Glanzman for The Washington Post)
A member of the Manchester Flames, an under-16 hockey team, wears a protective face mask while talking to a teammate during practice at the JFK Memorial Coliseum in Manchester, N.H. (Adam Glanzman for The Washington Post)
Ice hockey is part of the culture in this area of the country. Some kids get their first skates almost as soon as they can walk, and family weekends revolve around games. In the aftermath of the first wave of the virus, clubs in numerous states, including Massachusetts, introduced safety measures such as no checking at the younger levels, physical distancing in locker rooms, and masks for the two players doing the faceoffs.

Massachusetts Hockey President Bob Joyce said families who didn’t like those new rules took their children to play in neighboring states with fewer restrictions. And sometimes those players played on multiple teams or had siblings who did and went to school, creating very large social networks.

“It was a wake-up call,” Joyce said. He said state officials estimated that those 108 initial hockey cases amounted to 3,000 to 4,000 others potentially exposed.

In an October report, the CDC detailed a large outbreak in Florida among amateur adult hockey players on two teams that played each other but had no other contact. Investigators speculated that the indoor space and close contact increased the infection risk. They also pointed out that ice hockey “involves vigorous physical exertion accompanied by deep, heavy respiration, and during the game, players frequently move from the ice surface to the bench while still breathing heavily.”

Surrounded by plexiglass not only to prevent errant pucks but also to keep the airflow stable so the ice can remain cold, there’s little ventilation and humidity by design in ice rinks. The surface of the ice is kept around 20 degrees Fahrenheit; the ambient air temperature, in the 50s. The Department of Homeland Security has shown in lab experiments that the virus may live at those temperatures up to two times longer in the air. At 86 degrees, for example, 99 percent of the airborne virus is estimated to decay in 52 minutes. But at 50 degrees, it would take 109 minutes.

William Bahnfleth, a professor of architectural engineering at Penn State University, said there is growing evidence that humidity may play an important role. In higher humidity, the virus attaches to bigger droplets that drop faster to the ground, decreasing the chance that someone will inhale them. The drier the air, the faster droplets will evaporate into smaller-size particles that stay in the air, increasing the concentration.

“There are some researchers have come to believe that humidification is the key above all,” he said.

Studies have shown that the virus doesn’t survive as long in the humid air, and that we’re more susceptible to viruses when the air is drier. Separately, epidemiological data from a long-term care facility has shown a correlation between lower humidity and higher infection rates.

Rubin, who is a pediatrician in addition to his public policy research job, said he worries those on the ice may be inhaling larger doses of the virus due to these environmental conditions, making it more likely they will become infected.

“It’s very hard to sort out, but you wonder if increased inoculum of the virus is an extra factor,” he said.

The NHL was able to complete its season by placing players in a bubble and testing daily, an impossible task when it comes to the 650,000 amateur players across the United States. (Adam Glanzman for The Washington Post)
The NHL was able to complete its season by placing players in a bubble and testing daily, an impossible task when it comes to the 650,000 amateur players across the United States. (Adam Glanzman for The Washington Post)
Demming expressed similar thoughts: “It could be infection rates are common across sports, but in a sport like hockey where you are trapping more virus in the breathable air it could result in more severe infections that end up being symptomatic.”

The National Hockey League was able to complete its playoffs after players were put in a bubble where they were tested each day, administered symptom checks and temperature screenings. No cases were reported. But conducting such rigorous screening on the roughly 650,000 amateur players and officials in the United States is an impossible task.

In Vermont, an outbreak at a single ice rink ripped through the center of the state, affecting at least 20 towns in at least four counties, and seeding other outbreaks at several schools. By Oct. 30, when Vermont Gov. Phil Scott (R) detailed the outbreak at a press briefing, 473 contacts had been associated with it.

“One case,” Scott emphasized, “can turn one event into many.”

For Tyler Amburgey, a 29-year-old coach in Lavon, Texas, north of Dallas, the coronavirus started out like a cold. But then it soon progressed to a headache, fatigue and shortness of breath. Authorities later determined that the outbreak spanned several teams and 30 people. By the third day of his illness, Aug. 29, several of Amburgey’s players had tested positive, and he was so ill that he canceled hockey practice.

Later that day his wife found him in his bed, unresponsive, and called 911. His heart had stopped, relatives told media outlets, and paramedics were unable to revive him.

[shoeshine boy]

The question is why is it spreading more in hockey than other sports.

I know some folks think it's the "meat-packing plant" type atmosphere in a rink. I'm betting that it could also have to do with lack of mask wearing. in our local league we had a superspreader game about 2 weeks ago. almost an entire team became infected. out of 13 players and a goalie, 11 players became infected, 2 players had immunity from previous infections and the goalie, who always wears a face mask both in the locker room and on the ice (the only player to do that) never tested positive. at our rinks you are supposed to keep your mask on except for on the ice but it's not enforced.

[Tomas]

FWIW, Czech Extraleague started September 17 - so the teams were together since August (pre-season). By exactly the middle of October, the percentage of COVID-infected players, coaches, and team support members was 73%!

Not surprisingly, in the last several weeks, there have been pretty much no new cases after the league was allowed to resume on November 7 (no games were played October 12(?) - November 7).

[Freddy Rumsen]

[eddy]

Some more local flavor for you:

I ordered Mexican take out last night, and was told it was a 35 minute wait. That's unheard of for this place.

I go to pick it up and the parking lot is full, and the restaurant is packed. We do not have indoor eating restrictions in place. I've been going to this place for ten years, and it was as busy as it's ever been for a random Thursday night. No spacing, obviously people eating without masks on.

On my way home, the big Baptist church lot is full and the overflow lot is half full. Not sure what was going on there, but knowing the types of folks that attend Southern Baptist churches in my area, probably not a whole lot of mask wearing going on inside. This is the sister church that had a big tent revival a month or two ago and caused its preschool to shut down, and a handful of people to get hospitalized and 1-2 died from it.

We're doomed.

I got mexican takeout last night and it was dead and the owner said it's been pretty slow. We get takeout there once a week because it's good and I want to help out. What did you get to eat?

[King Colby]

Got my brain stabbed. Not as bad as I remembered when I had a flu test last year

[DigitalGypsy66]

What did you get to eat?

Carnitas. And they were tasty.

[King Colby]

1,197 new cases in Allegheny today but only 779 from PCR tests. The rest were probable.

Can someone explain what that means both by definition and practically?

[MR25]

My guess for probable cases is where someone calls their doctor and says they have had symptoms of COVID for a couple days and their doctor says "You probably have it, don't leave your house, don't bother getting tested", or they count family members/housemates of those who test positive as part of the count.

[count2infinity]

If memory serves, to be officially a case, it needs to get a pcr test (gold standard of viral tests). You could be positive in the antibody, antigen, or whatever other test and it’s considered probable... probably.

[King Colby]

I thought what c2i said too. I wonder why today there would be such a large volume of probable cases relative to every other day

[NAN]

1,197 new cases in Allegheny today but only 779 from PCR tests. The rest were probable.

Can someone explain what that means both by definition and practically?

When I tested positive they listed my wife as probable even though she didn't test or have had symptoms yet.

[DigitalGypsy66]

The frustration is palpable.

[NAN]

The frustration is palpable.

Don't blame her one bit. Some of these leaders make no sense with their arbitrary rules.

[shafnutz05]

The frustration is palpable.

Absolutely terrible. I'm as COVID-conscious as it gets, but the colossal POS mayors and governors seem to just be wielding their increasingly unchecked powers selectively and unfairly.

Chef Andrew Gruel is a great follow on Twitter as it relates to this issue. It's sad.

[shoeshine boy]

am I missing something with that? the movie stuff doesn't seem any closer together than her setup....

[faftorial]

am I missing something with that? the movie stuff doesn't seem any closer together than her setup....

Her outdoor dining has been shut down but the movie production people have permission to stay open? Is that the situation?

[shafnutz05]

This is good stuff. I have a healthy degree of cynicism with any sort of crowd funding stuff, but this is nice to see.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-the-pin ... ill-saloon