Category: the Coronacene Epoch

The Texas Rangers held their home opener yesterday, as promised at full capacity at their new (if you don’t count the games last season with no fans or the NLCS and World Series with some fans) stadium. Did every news outlet on earth give it in-depth coverage, so that readers could google in awe and/or horror at Texans packed cheek to jowl watching sports during a pandemic? With sweet, sweet clicks at stake, what do you think?

Let’s start with the New York Times, which used an Associated Press drone (I think) to capture people waiting to get in to the park in socially distanced lines, sort of:

You can’t tell all that much from that image. For one thing, are those fans wearing masks, as the Rangers and MLB said would be required? Or ignoring the mask requirement, as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged them to do? Let’s take a closer look inside the stadium:

That’s not a lot of masks! Of course, there is a loophole to the mask requirement at ballgames this year, which is that you can remove them while actively eating and drinking. This photo, though, as should immediately be apparent, was taken during the national anthem, when presumably most people are not eating or drinking. “Sorry, I can’t put my mask on, I’m busy chewing on patriotism!”

Let’s next try the opposite end of the news spectrum from the New York Times, KULR-TV in Billings, Montana, which was likewise all over the story with an item headlined “Maskless fans pack sold out stadium in stunning display,” though it turned out just to link to a CNN video:

That’s epidemiologist Michael Osterholm in the corner, about to say that “already we’re seeing the surge” in places like Michigan and Minnesota despite those states ramping up vaccinations, saying in the next six to ten weeks, we’re going to have more viral spread thanks to reopenings and not yet enough shots to counter it.

Want your packed-stadium photos in pointless-video form? We got that too:

So this is what a packed ballpark feels like?! Almost forgot. What a sight! pic.twitter.com/L4nz2lc7fi

— Sam Gannon (@SamGannon87) April 5, 2021

As we’ve discussed here before, pandemics are not clean-cut moral dilemmas, so there’s no sure way of knowing what the result of the Rangers’ experiment with non-distancing will be. The roof was open, so there was tons of air circulation, but also people were right next to each other largely without masks on, which is pretty much the only good way to get infected while outside:

“The risk is lower outdoors, but it’s not zero,” said Shan Soe-Lin, a lecturer at the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. “And I think the risk is higher if you have two people who are stationary next to each other for a long time, like on a beach blanket, rather than people who are walking and passing each other.”

One recent study found that just talking can launch thousands of droplets that can remain suspended in the air for eight to 14 minutes. But the risk of inhaling those droplets is lower outdoors.

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens over the 4 to 14 days before passing judgment on whether the Rangers owners were unthinkably reckless or acceptably reckless here. And even then, it may come down as much to luck as to good or bad planning, as a handful of people shedding virus in the wrong place can easily make the difference between explosive spread and not much. At least Rangers execs limited full attendance to opening day — they’re switching to distanced seating after yesterday’s game — which should make for an excellent controlled experiment in how much difference distance makes in preventing viral spread at outdoor, unmasked events. Those sports team owners, always thinking about the future journal articles!

One year ago today, the sports world screeched to a halt: In a span of just 24 hours, all the major leagues had suspended their seasons, the NCAA basketball tournament had been canceled, and we entered the long, strange time that we will likely remember just as “2020,” even if it didn’t start until a couple of months into the calendar year and won’t fully end until who knows when.

The return to something approaching normal is likely to be strange and herky-jerky — here’s a good Q&A with epidemiologist Ashish Jha about how it’s likely to go — so it’s probably appropriate that today’s big news is that the Texas Rangers will be playing three home games (two exhibition, one Opening Day) next month not only with fans in the stands, but at full capacity:

On Wednesday, the Rangers announced their in-person attendance policies for the start of the 2021 season, which include offering all 40,518 seats to potential ticket buyers for two exhibition games on March 29 and 30, as well as for the team’s home opener on April 5. (After that, the team plans to limit capacity and introduce social-distancing in some sections of seats for further games.)

It’s unclear whether the organization somehow believes the virus will behave differently after opening day than it will for the three games at which there will be no attendance cap. In an email to Texas Monthly, John Blake, the team’s executive vice president for communications, said, “The total number [of tickets available after opening day] will depend on demand and can be expanded if needed.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott famously “opened Texas 100%” last week, so it’s not entirely surprising that some sports team owner was going to take advantage by seeing how many fans they could jam into their new open-air (unless the butt-ugly roof is closed) stadium. But like so many “reopening” things over the next few weeks and months, it’s likely going to raise a whole lot of conflicting emotions along the lines of this is so exciting but uh are we doing this too soon and all going to die?

Let’s lay out the arguments for and against this being a historic disaster:

It’ll be fine: Things are very different in the world now than they were last fall, when the Rangers’ stadium admitted a small number of fans who were supposed to stay masked and distanced (but didn’t really) for the NLCS and World Series: Unlike then, virus rates are falling, and the people the most vulnerable to getting sick are getting vaccinated at an unprecedented pace, even if going a lot faster in some places than in others. There were no identifiable mass outbreaks after the World Series or other outdoor sporting events with limited fans — here’s an article that claims there has yet to be a single “confirmed super-spreading event that occurred solely outdoors,” though that ignores a lot of things like that infamous Champions League match in Milan and Sturgis and Trump rallies, or at least is strict about “solely outdoors” in a way that probably excludes baseball games, too. In that interview above with Jha, he even says that outdoor mask mandates can probably be safely dropped sooner than other measures, or could be if it didn’t get people thinking oh cool, pandemic’s over and then have them start packing into bars and family gatherings without masks and really kick off some major superspreading. So a bunch of people, many of whom will be vaccinated or have antibodies as a result of having gotten sick during Texas’s deadly January surge, packing together for a couple of hours to watch baseball, with lots of airflow and presumably masks on, is maybe not the biggest concern — or at least, not nearly as big a concern as all the sports bars they’ll be packing into after the game.

What are you, nuts? While the U.S. may be on the brink of escaping from this nightmare thanks to vaccinations, it’s simultaneously on the brink of another surge, with new, more transmissible variants ready to take advantage of eased restrictions to send viral rates soaring again. Rates have fallen since their January peak thanks to people getting vaccinated and staying out of public, but have plateaued since then, thanks to new variants and a bunch of reopenings that really could have waited just a few more weeks. As could having a full house for a baseball game: Even if you wishcast that a couple of full-capacity games might be fine, is it really worth going back to more lockdowns and more deaths when it could be just a matter of weeks before waiting for the all-clear?

In the end, as with so much about reopenings, the answer is let’s roll the dice and find out. Given that past sports reopenings went better than expected — even while restaurant reopenings and family holiday reopenings seem to have gone much worse than expected — I’m tentatively optimistic that we will remember the Rangers’ cheek-to-jowl Opening Day as the start of a return to normalcy, not as that time a sports owner decided to play Russian roulette with people’s lives in an effort to wring a quick buck out of the return of baseball before everyone noticed how dreadful his team was going to be. But then, it can be both: The very nature of Russian roulette is that most of the times you pull the trigger, everything turns out fine. Get real familiar with outcome bias, because we’re likely to be talking about it a lot in the weeks and months ahead.