Governor Inslee makes the right call by restricting gatherings of more than 250 people, including sporting events

As the coronavirus crisis continues to dominate our world, the concept of social distancing is becoming an international slogan not to mention a guiding principle for a safer lifestyle.

In many ways, sporting events present the antithesis of social distance (which is defined as a way to separate communities so that people affected by a contagious disease cannot pass it on to others who are not).

Sports are intimate. They are crowded. They gather masses of people for two or three hours, which can inevitably be close contact. They are, to some extent, inherently unsanitary.

And, at this unique and difficult moment, they are extremely problematic. Especially in the Seattle area, where we have the unfortunate distinction of being the epicenter of the coronavirus 190 confirmed cases and 22 deaths in King County until Tuesday, according to King County Public Health.

For this reason, I applaud Governor Jay Inslees for the announcement at a press conference on Wednesday morning that rallies of more than 250 people, including at sporting events and concerts, are limited to King, Snohomish and Pierce counties.

I know that I couldn't have been the only one wondering how long we would continue to organize sporting events, with spectators, as these numbers are increasing every day. And meditating, with growing skepticism, the wisdom to do so.

These numbers threaten to grow exponentially. I remember a math challenge that my father gave me when I was about 8 years old. Would I rather have $ 20 now, or a penny doubled every day for a month?

In my youthful naivety, I opted for the (hypothetical) Jackson, not realizing that the penny scenario would reach more than $ 5 million in 30 days. This concept always puzzles me, actually, but you can do the math yourself.

What is this anecdote relevant to, if not to show that I was not a budding Einstein? At a press conference in Olympia on Tuesday, Inslee noted that the number of people infected with an epidemic like this would double in Washington State, unless we take concrete action here. And if you do the math, it becomes very disturbing. When something doubles every day, it happens to a very large number of very quickly. If there are a thousand people infected today, in seven or eight weeks, there could be 64,000 people infected in Washington state, if we don't slow down in one way or another this epidemic, and next week it would be 120,000 and next week it would be a quarter million.

The key phrases are to take real action and slow this epidemic. And it is becoming more and more difficult to justify the risks associated with the conduct of large-scale sports activities, without even taking into account the growing concern of opponents of the adventure in Washington. This week's University of Washingtons softball tournament against the United States national team will be followed by a three-game streak against Utah to open the Pac-12 season and match XFL dragons against the Los. Angeles Wildcats Sunday at CenturyLink Field.

The opening of the Mariners house in recent years, a sale of more than 40,000 weaving looms on March 26 at the T-Mobile park. This is the start of a seven-game home game, followed by another nine home games in April.

Now it seems that our stadiums, arenas and gymnasiums will be closed indefinitely or emptied of their fans. To the extent that games are canceled, it would be a blow to the athletes, both professional and amateur, who trained so hard for these events and longed for the opportunity to compete. It would be a blow to the fans who get such psychic pleasure partly visceral, partly by proxy by watching these competitions in person.

But it is the right thing to do. In light of the increasingly frightening health risks of maintaining the status quo, the only thing.

This is not done in isolation. Around the world, and increasingly across the country, sporting events are canceled, postponed, moved or played in empty halls. On Tuesday, the Ivy League canceled its men's and women's basketball tournaments and chose to send its regular season champion to NCAA tournaments, and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine recommended that no spectator be allowed to participate in indoor sports, including high school, college. and professional teams.

Santa Clara County announced on Monday a ban on gatherings of over 1,000 people, questioning three NHL games, an MLS game and the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament at Stanford . Meanwhile, the NBA, NHL, MLB and MLS have jointly announced that their locker rooms will be closed to the media. And over the weekend, the NCAA Division III basketball tournament matches took place in an empty venue in the Johns Hopkins University arena in Baltimore, closed to fans.

Washington, of all places, could not continue to justify letting fans flock. I fully agree with the nerve-wracking decisions that teams and schools have faced in the past three weeks. I have no doubt that they acted on the best advice of health experts and with the best of intentions. The Sounders, for example, were licensed by King County Public Health to play their game on Saturday at CenturyLink Field, and they went to great lengths to sanitize the stadium before and after.

This match attracted an announced crowd of 33,080 people, which was the lowest since 2009, but also a large gathering of people. Keep in mind that the King County Public Health website states that if you can avoid gathering large groups of people, consider postponing events and rallies.

Now Inslee is apparently withdrawing the case from the sports administrators. We'll learn more about the details on Wednesday, and over the next few days, find out how the professional, college and secondary teams will handle these new restrictions. But this is an absolutely necessary step in the direction of containment, which at this stage of the epidemic is paramount.

In a recent article by organic chemist Stephanie Springer on Baseball Prospectus, the infectious disease specialist, Dr. Amesh Adalja, principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, noted that even with the increase in washing stations and hand disinfection in a stage, the infection will not be completely preventable during such mass gatherings.

In the same article, epidemiologist Beth Linas pointed out that this was further complicated by the fact that bystanders may not know if the person sitting next to them is infected and the infected person does not know it. maybe not either.

If the report is correct, some who are infected do not feel sick, they do not know they are sick and they can infect others when they attend games, "said Linas. This becomes more worrying if the elderly and immunocompromised (spectators) are at play and exposed.

I obviously do not have the medical expertise to declare the cessation of games. I will defer to Tom Frieden, who was the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 to 2017, overseeing the emergency response to three previous potential H1N1, Ebola and Zika outbreaks.

In a Frieden article published Tuesday in the Think Global Health newsletter, he outlined 10 steps the United States should take to, in his words, reduce the risk that a million people in that country will die from this pandemic. . The fourth he listed was:

Cancel large gatherings, except for geographic regions and populations not experiencing community transmission. Making this difficult decision now could mean the difference between thousands and tens of thousands of infections in a community. If mass meetings take place, the elderly and medically vulnerable should not attend.

Yascha Mounk, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has a current article in The Atlantic titled, Canceling Everything: Social Distancing is the Only Way to Stop Coronavirus. We have to start immediately.

In a tweet Monday, Mounk wrote:

Are you the head of a sports team, the president of a university or the organizer of a conference?

* Play your games without an audience.

* Organize online courses.

* Postpone your conference.

This may seem like a difficult call today. It will soon seem obvious.

Here in Seattle, it was becoming more and more evident day by day.

How does this epidemic affect you, if any?

Are you changing your routine or going about your business as usual? Have you canceled or postponed plans? What types of discussions do you have with family members and friends? Are you a healthcare worker who is on the front line of the answer? Whoever you are, we want to hear from you so that our media coverage is as complete, accurate and useful as possible.