By Stan Caldwell
stanmansportsfan.com
Wednesday evening, I sat down and looked up some numbers on the coronavirus, then looked up some pandemics from the past trying to get a comparison.
What I learned is scary.
As of Wednesday night, the United States had 641,919 confirmed cases of the Covid-19 virus, of which 28,399 resulted in death. Mississippi was at 3,087 cases, with 111 deaths.
I started there, using the numbers from Wednesday night; they change upward daily, so these numbers may not be quite the same by the time you read this. But they’ll be close enough for the argument I want to make.
The death rate – that is, number of deaths divided by number of cases – nationally is 4.4 percent. Mississippi is running at 3.6 percent, which ranks 18th among the 50 states plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.
I began to look at other states, where this disease has been even deadlier, and found some mighty grim statistics.
Well over a third of the nation’s total of confirmed cases, 42 percent, are from two states, New York and New Jersey. New York State alone was 202,208 cases, with 10,834 deaths; New Jersey has 2,805 dead out of 68,824 cases.
Louisiana? Our next-door neighbors had the fourth-highest total number of deaths, 1,013, out of 21,518, a mortality rate of 4.7 percent.
Michigan? Where large groups of protesters descended on the state capitol Wednesday demanding an end to the state’s lockdown? Michigan was at 28,059 cases, with 1,921 deaths, a mortality rate of 6.8 percent, by far the highest in the nation.
Want to know which state had the third-highest mortality rate in the country? Kansas. The Sunflower State had 76 deaths in 1,494 cases.
Keep in mind several things here. First, these are just the confirmed cases of coronavirus, and there are still some discrepancies in which deaths can, or should, be attributed to the virus that vary from one state to another.
Also, this virus has yet to hit everywhere. People in remote areas with relatively few cases can say, “oh, well I live in West Texas, how does what’s going on in the cities affect me?” Be patient. The coronavirus is coming to you too, cowboy, sooner, if not later.
A website I frequent that keeps me informed on what’s going on in Kansas, where I grew up and still have a boatload of friends, reported that three cases have been confirmed in Hamilton County, which is about as far out in the middle of nowhere as you can get, right on the Colorado border.
Finally, I checked the mortality rates for the notorious Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 that killed somewhere between 20 million and 40 million worldwide. The final death rate for that period was 2.5 percent.
Right now, we have 33 states, plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, running at 2.5 percent or higher. Even states that did a good job of getting their citizens locked down, such as California, still have death rates over 3 percent.
Oh, and the flu, which some still insist is deadlier than the coronavirus, generally runs at a mortality rate of about 0.3 percent.
What all of this tells me is that America is still in the grips of this thing and the medical professionals don’t have a clue when it’s going to end.
Mississippi is supposed to be under quarantine orders until April 30. Personally, I don’t think this state is going to be near ready for business as usual by then. I’m not sure it will be ready by the end of May.
Of course, that’s not going to stop our governor, nor other state governors of similar persuasion, from ending the shelter-in-place rules that have been the rule since April 3.
As for sports, the Mississippi High School Activities Association officially pulled the plug on the 2019-20 high school athletic year on Wednesday, that announcement coming a day after the governor announced that schools would not reopen for the rest of the school year.
My good friend Brandon Shields, who does yeoman work for Mississippi Gridiron, tweeted Wednesday night that not having games to cover until August is a real bummer, and it is that.
But I’ve got news for Brandon and anyone else who is chomping at the bit to get back in the arena. I don’t think we’re going to be covering games in August either.
I don’t think there are going to be any sports anywhere until a viable vaccine for coronavirus is on the market and widely distributed. Most forecasters don’t see a vaccine being ready until a year from now at the earliest.
College conference commissioners have already said point-blank that as long as university campuses remain closed, student-athletes will not be competing. I can’t see it being any different for high schools. As for pro sports without fans? Hard pass from here.
I’ll be honest. I do miss sports, but not badly enough to risk my life for them.
I was in a bit of a funk earlier Wednesday and my lovely wife said it was because I missed the routine of sports, the fellowship with other media members, the coaches, friends in the press box and, most of all, the kids whose exploits we document.
There is a lot to that, but I’m getting by all right. I’ve watched a lot of educational shows, documentaries and stuff, done some reading, some writing. And yard work. We’ve done a bunch of work in the back yard, especially on an old rotten hickory tree that fell over.
My wife found an old syndicated show that she likes called Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, hosted by Star Trek: The Next Generation star Jonathan Frakes.
The show offers five supposedly stranger-than-fiction stories and invites viewers to guess which ones are fact and which ones are fiction. That’s kind of fun to play. We’ve gotten pretty good at spotting the fakes.
And, of course, every weekday at 4:30 p.m. it’s must-see TV when Jeopardy! comes on. This week the famed trivia show is having its College Tournament.
Among the 15 kids who made it to the first round of the tournament last week was Londyn Lorenz, a sophomore at Ole Miss from Perryville, Missouri. She won her first game last week, and looked impressive doing it, then came back Tuesday for the semifinal round.
Alas, Lorenz lost in the semis, finishing second in her game. When she was able to ring in and answer, she was usually correct. But one of the biggest keys to success on the show is the signaling device, and if your opponents are quicker to ring in, then it doesn’t matter how much you know.
Lorenz did the best she could, finishing Double Jeopardy with $7,000, which she doubled when she got the Final Jeopardy correct. But it wasn’t enough, as the young man who won led going into Final and also got the answer right.
The two-game total-points final round began on Thursday featuring a young lady from Southern Cal against two guys, one from Indiana University and one from the University of Minnesota.
Jeopardy! has suspended taping of new shows during the quarantine, so I’m not sure what they’re going to do when they run out of taped programs. The Jeopardy! website says they have enough shows in the can for about another month before they must start scrambling.
Saturday nights I’ve been sitting back and watching taped webcasts of Dead and Company shows. I text back and forth with my brother in Texas while we enjoy three hours of grooves from our favorite rock band.
I make no secret of the fact that I’m a lifelong Grateful Deadhead. I got on the bus, as they say, at my first Dead show on October 28, 1977 at Kansas City while I was in college, and I’ve been a fan ever since.
The late Jerry Garcia is the only performer I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen plenty of great ones – whose guitar playing can move me to tears.
Dead and Company is a reincarnation of the Dead with young gun John Mayer joining the venerable Bob Weir in bringing the Grateful Dead’s music back to life.
Mayer has pretty much sacrificed a popular solo career to bring joy to us Deadheads, and if he isn’t Jerry, he’s a damn good substitute.
My wife and I had tickets to see Dead and Company at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, but that’s not going to happen.
The Jazzfest foundation announced Thursday that this year’s festival will not happen, because New Orleans is still one of the hottest of hotbeds for the coronavirus. Our tickets will be good for next year’s festival, which is being scheduled – optimistically – for its usual spring dates.
Like sports events, live shows – be they music, comedy, drama, lectures, whatever – will almost certainly not happen until it’s safe.
I’m disappointed, sure, but I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that 2020 is going to be a lost year.
I’m going to miss shows, games, high school graduations (a niece and a grandniece), another niece’s wedding, visits to see my parents and family. I’m going to miss eating out at a restaurant and casually shopping.
I might get a chance to hug my daughter before the year is out, but I don’t know when that will be. I’m willing to forego all of that because I understand that it’s just not safe to do any of that for the foreseeable future.
Oh, I hear a lot of people, especially business owners, complaining about not being allowed to open their stores and establishments. I feel their pain, but I must ask these folks the $64,000 Question.
Which of your customers’ lives are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of your business? Who among your workforce are you willing to let die because you opened your doors before it was safe?
Remember, right now the death rate from this pandemic is roughly 4 percent. That is four deaths out of every 100 cases, 1 in 25, and that’s not considering the many more than that who survive but may face a long, debilitating recovery process.
I’m going to put it in terms similar to something my daughter wrote earlier this week. She’s single, at home with her dog, and is a voracious reader. She graduated from USM with a degree in microbiology, so she’s used to reading stuff that is deep.
As a result, she’s become a rather deep thinker on social issues of the day, and she had the answer for those who say that a significant number of deaths by coronavirus is better than letting the American economy continue to stall out.
You line up 25 random people, then take a pistol with 25 chambers (I know such a weapon probably doesn’t exist, but work with me here) containing one bullet that will be instantly fatal and three others that will leave you seriously, maybe permanently, wounded.
Then you take that pistol to the first person in your line of 25, put it to his or her head and pull the trigger. You do that until all four bullets have fired, with one person lying dead and three others seriously injured.
That is what the coronavirus is doing, right now. And your right to go and do whatever you want whenever and wherever you want – which is what these “protesters” in Michigan and other states are basically saying they are being denied – ends where my right to life begins.
The Declaration of Independence lists three inalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The first of these is life. If you don’t have life, then liberty and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless.
Lockdown and social distancing orders are in place for the greater good of the public, for the safety of all citizens, and they are working. It’s a slow process, but the evidence is clear that this quarantine is “flattening the curve” of new coronavirus cases.
The worst thing we can do right now is to look at this as proof that we’re out of the woods and can go back to work, or that it really wasn’t as bad as expected. If we don’t kill it now, then it will come back and keep coming back with a vengeance.
In late 1918, after a long summer and fall of national quarantine measures had reduced the death toll from Spanish Flu to a manageable number, Americans weary of being cooped up took to the streets in large numbers to celebrate the Armistice that ended World War I.
The result was a renewed spiking of flu cases and another large number of deaths, extending the pandemic well into 1919, even into 1920 before it truly abated.
Among those who caught it on its second go-round was the president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, who contracted it in Paris while attending the Versailles Peace Conference.
He survived, but it led to a decline in Wilson’s general health until he suffered a paralyzing stroke in September 1919 while on a national speaking tour to rally support for the League of Nations. He was an invalid for the remaining 18 months of his term.
The great 20th century philosopher George Santayana said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. So far, we’ve been doing a bang-up job in 2020 of repeating the mistakes of 1918.
I don’t like being shut in at home trying to manufacture things to do with my time any more than anyone else. But if that’s the price I must pay – that we all must pay – to continue to live a healthy life, then that’s what I’ll do.
When the medical professionals – the independent medical pros – say it’s safe to start eating out and going to shows, then I’ll do so, and all of the politicians and CEOs who are urging a premature reopening of the economy I will simply ignore.
Stan Caldwell is a 35-year veteran sportswriter in the Hattiesburg area, and most recently served as sports information director at Pearl River Community College in Mississippi.
