1. Important NFL Findings That Should Be Publicized More
The NFL's giant COVID experiment ended yesterday with the improbable feat of an on-time Super Bowl, capping a season with no canceled games.
2. The NFL's successful season suggests that with the right resources, safety measures, and cooperation life can go on during the pandemic without uncontrolled spread of the virus.
3. The NFL decided early on that it wouldn't require its thousands of players, coaches and other staff to live in a "bubble," as other sports leagues had done.
4. Instead, the league scaled up the public health basics of social distancing, testing, contact tracing and isolation across all 32 teams. To prevent spread, officials were prepared to postpone games or bench players.
5. Jeff Miller, the NFL's executive vice president of communications, public affairs and policy: "The approach we took was to appreciate that there was an expectation that individuals would get COVID — and what could we do to prevent it from spreading throughout our facilities."
6. "Our protocols were built on that premise — that living in our 32 communities during a pandemic was a risk, but we wanted to ensure that as best as possible we could prevent" virus spread.
7. Some of the NFL's findings were published by the CDC — including what the league learned about transmission of the virus.
The most important changes the league had to make over time related to "our evolution of what a high-risk contact was," Miller said.
8. The league discovered that risky contacts with an infected person weren't limited to 15-minute interactions within 6 feet. The definition instead became more complex, factoring in time, distance, ventilation and mask-wearing.
9. "Those four factors all had an interplay within them, which was, in our experience, vastly more complicated than six feet and 15 minutes," Miller said.
10. Here's the most intriguing and fascinating thing: "We never saw the virus transmitted across the line of scrimmage," Miller said — even when players who later tested positive participated in the game.
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2. Time’s Molly Ball happily describes a “conspiracy” among the progressive left, big labor, big business and the Washington establishment to counter Donald Trump and suppress unwanted elements of U.S. political conversation before and after Election Day.
3. Like the various actors she describes at the heart of this vast campaign, Ms. Ball presents it as a virtuous effort to protect democracy from Mr. Trump and Covid-19.
1. Progressive Administrations Suck at Saving Lives
New York Times, of all sources, explains how.
Progressive leaders in much of the world are now struggling to distribute coronavirus vaccines quickly and efficiently, as opposed to places with conservative governance.
2. Europe’s vaccination rollout “has descended into chaos,” as Sylvie Kauffmann of Le Monde, the French newspaper, has written. One of the worst performers is the Netherlands, which has given a shot to less than 2 percent of residents.
3. Canada (at less than 3 percent) is far behind the U.S. (about 8.4 percent), thanks to Trump administration's aggressive distribution of vaccines.
How about people who are fat or smoke?
Or an open-borders supporter shot by an illegal alien?
Or gang members shot in a gang fight?
Or someone who contracted AIDS by engaging in unprotected sex?
Or a Democratic mayor shot by Antifa?
.
.
Would you waste your energy on any of them?
And the honorable doctor deleted his tweet. He should probably delete his account too. He is a hospital physician who advocated not wasting energy on COVID patients who don't wear masks. He called them "COVID deniers" and said let them die so they learn COVID is not a hoax.
Here is one of the gems from Dr. Cleavon Gilman.
(h/t: @RoyalTXGirl)
1. WSJ: Why Won’t the President Listen to the Experts?
President Joe Biden is still claiming the economy needs another massive “rescue” bill from Washington.
But even the Beltway economics establishment is rejecting his diagnosis.
2. The Congressional Budget Office, an institution created by Congress in 1974 to enable higher spending, is not exactly a bastion of free-market economics. But there’s no denying the strength in the private economy. And so CBO has now raised its expectations.
3. With a good policy mix the economy could advance even faster, but there’s now a clear consensus among economists that the U.S. is in growth mode. CBO opines:
1. The Meltup's Real-world Positive Consequences: AMC Edition!
Well, positive in the sense of having a beneficial impact on the balance sheet of a real world company, as opposed to banal warfare between computer algorithms. Here are the details -- full credit to AMC management.
2. Thanks to Reddit, AMC Entertainment has managed to take $700 million of debt off its balance sheet, as well as raising $506 million of fresh cash in the stock market.
3. The movie-theater chain converted $100 million of junior debt into equity on Monday, while also raising fresh equity capital. Then, on Thursday, it announced that $600 million of senior debt had also been converted into equity, at a price of $13.51 per share.
1. GameStop: A Morality Play Or A Societal Clusterf*ck
A half-forgotten and unprofitable videogame retailer is bizarrely on the lips of the nation, because the GameStop story touches on economic and cultural forces that affect everyone, whether they own any stock or not.
2. In most Wall Street fights, the broader public doesn't have a rooting interest. This one — where a group of small traders won a multibillion-dollar bet against giant hedge funds — is different.
3. The core GameStop story is a simple morality tale. A scrappy and happy band of Wall Street outsiders, armed with little more than moxie and their stimulus checks, have not only made millions for themselves, but have also humbled big-name fund managers.