To establish ethos: I’m a senior in high school. I’ll never get to compete in FIRST ever again - though maybe I’ll be a mentor or volunteer several years from now. I’ve worked very hard on this year’s robot, and I believe that this year, we’ve built our best robot in my four years of competition. My elderly family members do not live in the country. None of my immediate family has a compromised immune system.
But to continue to hold events of more than 1000 people is irresponsible. This goes for the NBA and sporting events, but it also goes for FIRST. I understand that the decision to cancel or postpone events is excruciating, and I do not envy anyone who has to make that decision. But large, multi-day gatherings, with people in close proximity from several different states, is a public health nightmare. Measures such as placing hand sanitizer everywhere and not sharing goggles is a step in the right direction - but you will still have people touching power cells, people touching doors, interactions between teams and scouts - it’s simply impossible to stop close and risky contacts at an FRC competition.
In the best case, the season is postponed in its entirety. Robots are bagged by a certain day to avoid an infinite build season. Events take place in the summer. In the worst case, logistical problems prevent the season from finishing. This would obviously be depressing - but I’d much rather live without robotics, rather than be dealing with unconstrained spread of a deadly virus.
To me, gracious professionalism involves some amount of self-sacrifice: be it a sacrifice of your time, or your ego, whatever it may be. I think it is both the pragmatic thing to do (we help preserve the public health of both the human race and the FIRST community), and the moral thing to do, to sacrifice this season.
It seems FIRST and its district and regional subsidiaries are following the guidance of local health authorities as far as canceling/postponing events, and honestly that seems to be the most reasonable course of action to me. The state I am in has only had three recorded cases so far and the risk is low so the local health authorities haven’t suggested cancelling any events yet, and none have been canceled. First and local First organisations are not in the public health or health science business and frankly it wouldn’t make sense for them to solely make a call either way on the issue. Also I’m selfish and don’t want our hard work to be for not, but that’s irrelevant to the decision that’s made by First.
Generally we don’t hide posts just for being arguably wrong, but I think in the case of spreading disinformation about an active pandemic, it’s worth making an exception. If you are going to make an extremely bold claim, such as stating that most of the country has already contracted the virus, you will need to provide some citation. This is too dangerous to be messing around with conjecture.
“Coronavirus” is a class of viruses that includes many strains of the flu. COVID-19, which is often called coronavirus because it is a coronavirus, first emerged in 2019. Stop spreading such blatant misinformation.
You said “the coronavirus”, and the topic of this thread is clearly not about every strain of flu, but about the COVID-19 epidemic. COVID-19 is called coronavirus for short because it is a kind of coronavirus; coronavirus is not a separate single virus but a class of viruses. If you know the difference between the terms, then you know why you were misunderstood. If you don’t know the difference, you shouldn’t be posting like this about it. Either way, knock it off.
You knew very well what people would take it as. We are discussing COVID-19 here. Bringing up “coronavirus” in reference to something that has been around for years is not helpful in the slightest. If you’re here just to cause confusion, please don’t.
Only response I would think they would postpone it or cancel it is because pnw is postponed so a ton of teams can’t even try to get to worlds and probably more will get postponed
Thank you for your well thought out and reasoned response.
Back to the OG topic. I’m ok with a sweeping canceling of the season. We are at a point where school districts are limiting travel left and right and events are being postponed/cancelled left and right. We are at a state of constant worry and stress over many things but a wide swept canceling of the season would remove a lot of will they won’t they happening with teams across the globe right now. I’d much rather have the events cancelled and nothing come of it than to go full steam ahead like it is and have it cancelled the day before or the day of travel for teams. This wastes tons of money and causes more stress.
This is much bigger than all our wants to be able to use our creations. We talk about the Chairman’s award and how FIRST is more than just robots. Well now is the time to show that that is actually what we all mean and practice.