Maybe. Depends. Could be. For certain.
This anecdote doesn’t prove events are safe… It’s a statistical chance that spread occurs…
Everyone could have driven to the event with no seatbelts without issue, but that experiment isn’t sufficient to prove seat belts aren’t necessary.
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Adam, blink twice if you’re okay, this post is very logical…?
Dave
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Falcon 500s are the only motor you’ll ever need.
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I think you may have missed the end of my post. People were buckled in the entire time. Masks on, well-spaced pits, eating and drinking outside, spectating a good distance from one another.
I am not parlaying this empirical evidence into “let’s bring 70 teams and 3k people into a cramped space.”
But I do think with the provisions I described in my previous post. a form of in-person competition can safely exist.
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I understood your point, and don’t believe that event is an acceptable level of risk.
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Absolutely FIRST can resume. In most places, absolutely FIRST cannot resume with normal large events. The question is wrong - the discussion ought to be what can we safely provide at your location given your local health situation?
My team has resumed activities with remote team selection, safety training, sponsor contact, competition evaluation, remote programming, etc
When January comes, FIRST FRC and each team will need to make some decisions based on vaccine and virus conditions. For now, we need to keep providing this valuable learning and social activity to as many students as possible.
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As others have started to do, I think it is prudent to define some terms:
Safe: what exactly do we mean by safe? Safe is a relative term. Nothing is absolutely safe. There are substances in the air, water and food that are not 100% safe, so the act of breathing, drinking and eating carry some inherent risks. So, the question is whether it is safe enough. Since everyone has their own comfort level with risk, the answers are going to vary. I think it is helpful to compare the risk level to other things we are familiar with. In the case of COVID it could be helpful to compare it with other infectious diseases that are part of the risk equation for any public event. Currently, the disease burden of COVID is about 50% higher than the seasonal flu (but we have not been through a full winter season yet with COVID being widely circulating, so the full disease burden is not yet fully known). I think this is a helpful comparison point since the seasonal flu’s annual disease burden would be a lot higher if it were not for the vaccine. The risk of spreading or catching the flu in any given year depends on how good the vaccine is that year and how many people have had the vaccine. Many people would not participate in FIRST events without getting the vaccine, but in years where the flu vaccine has not proven to be very effective, I really don’t hear a lot of people saying that they are not going to attend events because of the risks associated with the flu. I know the diseases are different, but in many ways the Flu is a bigger risk because if you look at the death statistics from the flu in any given year, you will see that there are a lot more younger people that die from the flu compared to COVID, so it is a bigger risk to the demographics of a typical FIRST event.
Resume: what do we mean by resume? Do we mean typical events with thousands of people? Or do we mean any activities at all. FIRST has proposed several new event types that seek to reduce (not eliminate) the risks. We should be clear what type of event we are talking about when we answer this question.
I have shared this before, but i think it is relevant here as well. Researchers at Oxford and MIT have created this chart to rank the relative risk of different types of activities:
From this chart, you can see that if you reduce the number of people at an event (move from high occupancy to low occupancy), have good ventilation, wear masks and reduce the exposure time between people, that you are firmly in the green range, even being an indoor event. Does green mean that the risk is zero. Absolutely not, because that is impossible. It means that the risk is lower than activities in the yellow and red regions.
So the real question is: Are the events that FIRST has proposed safe enough? I don’t think there is one single answer to that question. It will vary from region to region and probably from person to person.
Perhaps we should also be asking whether there are additional things that we can and should be doing to make them safer.
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This is something everyone should be evaluating individually and within their own families / households, instead of simply relying on governments (be it federal, state, local) or organizations that can’t possibly know your unique situation. What risk is acceptable for some (households that in total are younger, healthier) simply isn’t acceptable for others (households with older members with serious medical conditions).
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with lots of restrictions in place
One thing about this attitude that strikes me wrong, is that this is a contagious disease…an individual’s actions do not only affect that individual.
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The point was about families and households. But if one is out in public and one catches the disease, who should they blame? The public for spreading the disease, or themselves for being out in public?
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I don’t see where you got this figure. According to the CDC the worst flu season since 2010 was 2017 which resulted in 61,000 deaths.
That is less than a third of the over 200,000 deaths already reported due to COVID 19.
That’s after much heavier precautions than are used to fight the flu. In fact in Australia where winter has just ended, the flu season appears to have been strongly mitigated by the precautions put in place to combat COVID 19.
https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/cda-surveil-ozflu-flucurr.htm/$File/flu-12-2020.pdf
Edit: Admittedly ,the Australia anecdote is a bit of apples and oranges because Australia’s response to the pandemic was different from America’s.
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While this is true, this is also not unique to COVID. Last year, I traveled out to SFO to see my newborn grandson. Our daughter made it a requirement that we receive the flu vaccine before travelling. She was rightly concerned about us bringing the flu with us and getting her kids sick. Since they were at higher risk, this was a reasonable precaustion.
If that trip had been scheduled within a week or so following a FIRST event, the discussion might have been different. I have come home from more than one FIRST even with the Flu or other infectious diseases in my time as a parent/mentor. While this does not pose a significant risk to our household, this would pose a significant risk to my daughter’s household. So, I would have been in a situation where I would have to chose between attending a FIRST event or visiting my grandchild. The effectiveness of the flu vaccine that year my have become a serious consideration.
The disease burden is the number of excess deaths that occur due to the disease compared to without the disease. While their have been around 200,000 deaths in the US attributed to COVID, the number of excess deaths is actually lower than that. This is because many of the people who have died that had COVID also have had multiple other contributory conditions (heart disease, etc.) and were quite elderly. Statistically speaking, a certain number of them would have passed away during this year without COVID. The CDC modelling techniques that are used to calculate the disease burden from the flu use cause of death statistics and some level of averaging, but would not necessarily attribute the death to the flu just because the person had the flu before they died. The paper that I was quoting that number from attempted to calculate the disease burden using a similar modelling technique as is typically used for the flu. So, if you use that modelling approach, the the excess deaths caused by the disease are less than the total number of people who died and who had the disease.
The 50% number I was quoting was a number that was published in a paper comparing the disease burden from a comparable timeframe between COVID and the Flu. Since COVID has not been with us for a full year yet, they used the period from Feb to June, if I recall correctly, and compared the number of excess deaths in 2020 due to COVID to the same time period in previous years due to the flu.
As you noted there are some problems with this comparison since the actions we have taken this year to combat COVID have been extraordinary compared to how we normally react to the Flu. It should be noted that the peak death rate occurred in mid-April before many of the precautions were in widespread application. Also the study noted that the flu vaccine results in a significantly lower disease burden each year than if we did not have the vaccine, which makes an apples to apples comparison even harder. More importantly in my mind, COVID was still emerging during this timeframe and was not as widespread as it is today. By comparison, the flu has many more entry vectors into the US at the beginning of flu season and therefore starts off much more widely spread. This study admitted those shortcomings in the paper and they concluded (as I attempted to state) that the overall disease burden from COVID will not be known for some time.
I probably should not have included that number in my post since it was actually not all that germane to my argument.
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As a nation we figured out how we can use robots flown by Airmen in Las Vegas to bomb the Taliban in Afghanistan. Why don’t we use that ingenuity for good. I would think that the smart people in FIRST could figure out how to allow teams to operate robots from further than 48 feet away.
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So that’s why the last 6 feet give connection issues!
There was an FTC team over the summer that developed a way for drivers to control their robot from different houses. I dont remember the exact specifics, but it seemed fairly usable. I am certain with the resources that teams and FIRST have that some form of remote operation, weather it be from another room of from the parking lot is entirely feasible.
(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)
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I’m not interested in blaming people. I’m interested in less disease spread.
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So make sure your household takes the proper precautions. Even when your local/city/state/national government says it’s OK to be out in public, make sure your family agrees that’s an acceptable risk before doing it.