At least as of Aug. 31, Iowa State plans to still have fans in the stands for the football season opener.
That fact was reiterated on Monday in another letter to fans from Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard when he approximately 25,000 spectators will be allowed into Jack Trice Stadium for the Sept. 12 contest with Louisiana.
Whether or not fans will be allowed into the stadium for any of the remaining games on the schedule, including the team’s home conference opener against Oklahoma on Oct. 5, will be predicated upon how well the mitigation processes are followed and how successful they are during the first game.
“If our mitigation actions are successful, we will allow all season ticket purchasers to attend the Oklahoma game Oct. 3. However, if we determine that mitigation measures were not followed adequately at the first game, we will have no fans at future games (beginning with Oklahoma),” Pollard wrote. “An important factor in the decision to allow fans is our belief that Cyclone fans are willing to adhere to our mitigation measures. The purpose of this letter is to ask for your support in helping create a safe environment while also providing our team an impactful home-field advantage. This is an incredible opportunity for Iowa State University to showcase its ability to successfully navigate the challenges associated with large outdoor events during a pandemic.”
Pollard, who is scheduled to meet with the media Monday afternoon, goes on to list the mitigation efforts required to attend the game, including a prior health check (not coming to the game if you’re sick or have symptoms of COVID-19), adjusted parking protocols, no tailgating, mandatory face coverings, revised stadium entry policies, adjusted seating, limiting the flow of fans during game time and changes to the departing the stadium process.
You can learn more about these efforts at this link.
This announcement came the same morning the New York Times listed Ames with the highest percentage of positive tests for COVID-19 per capita in the entire country. Iowa City is currently listed with the second highest-percentage.
“Lastly, this information is subject to revision,” Pollard wrote. “We will continue to monitor the situation closely the next two weeks and will take appropriate actions, including no fans for the first game, if circumstances warrant changes.”
You can read Jamie Pollard’s letter in its entirety right here.
[QUOTE=”BCClone, post: 7295221, member: 12687″]
And not all students live in story county or get tested there. So should she add those in? There are two who are online in our town 90 minutes away. One got tested and was negative, was that included or should it be. We can what if this for weeks but it won’t get us anywhere.
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The discussion was about the NYT article and how Wintersteen wanted to fight it. Which is dumb, because it was correct. And the spike happened directly two weeks after 801 day. I was addressing your response that the article was invalid because Wintersteen said so.
While I’m sure there are a lot of happy Cyclone fans, I question the decision – especially given the rampant spread in Ames right now.
I look at everything as risk/reward.
If you have fans, you increase the chances that one or more games become super-spreading events, and or just greatly increase infection rates/spread. The more spread there is in Ames, Story County, and Iowa, the greater the chances of things being locked down or closed down. Your risk is very high (shutting off the main revenue driver of TV cash) and your reward is for attendance revenue (already minimal given concession shutdown and reduced attendance).
If you don’t have fans, you take away one big, possibly super-spreading event and help keep community levels down some. It doesn’t remove any spread, but doesn’t dramatically add to it. While it wouldn’t guarantee anything, it has to somewhat decrease the chances of Ames/ISU being a focal point with calls to shut it down.
I guess I would take the safer bet of having the games without fans rather than roll the dice with 25,000 fans coming in/out of town when things are already at a new peak in town. Notre Dame is limiting to 15K in an 80K stadium which seems like a much better “let there be fans” option.
[QUOTE=”BCClone, post: 7295594, member: 12687″]
And you said the ISU number was 906. Where did you get that number for ISU students because Wintersteen showed 633 for the 14 days?
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My point was that the NY Times article is not for just ISU, or testing done at ISU. It’s for the entirety of Story County. 906 (from the NYT article) lines up with the Johns Hopkins numbers that I linked. Wintersteen’s 633 are either just students tested at ISU, or ISU students (not including everyone they have infected in the community) – but that does not matter to the NYT numbers. They are for Ames/Story County as a whole. I don’t know why she would argue with the numbers for the entire city (which is what is stipulated) saying they don’t match ISU’s numbers – they aren’t just [I]for[/I] ISU.
You can, however, look at the fact that ISU students (as defined by Wintersteen) comprise 70% of that total in a bubble. That’s fairly shameful.
[QUOTE=”BCClone, post: 7295607, member: 12687″]
How many of the students do you think are positive for Covid at all times on campus?
[/QUOTE]
I don’t understand the wording of your question, as stated.
[QUOTE=”BCClone, post: 7295618, member: 12687″]
What would you estimate the number of students with Covid to be now on campus? 100? 500? 2500? If 20% that would be roughly 6000 students would have active cases as we type.
[/QUOTE]
I have no idea – I do think the number is likely much higher than the 633. And that depends on if you mean living in the dorms, or just actively students. Since only students who live in the dorms were originally tested (not anyone living off-campus), there’s likely no way to know the exact parties/bars that started it. Even though the testing is there, they still aren’t encouraging people to get tested. Our son was just sent home from daycare today because his teacher one day last week is an ISU student who tested positive over the weekend – so he, the other teachers, and the other kids who were around her are all exposed and were sent home. We are self-quarantining our entire family for the two weeks, but she alone could have infected a dozen people with firsthand contact in one narrow application alone. That doesn’t count wherever she lives, any stores she went to, etc., etc.
[QUOTE=”BCClone, post: 7295682, member: 12687″]
I am curious what people consider “normal” rates to be. According to the tests we had, they were very consistent at 2.2% and that was from a large swath of Iowa and the US. So that would say that out of 30k students there should be 660 that will have positive tests on any day. Where this gets difficult is how much of the contact tracing and other non symptom testing is just hitting people who had it and never knew. The CDC is saying that people can test positive up to 3 months after having had COVID. That may mean that you may have had it on July 4th and did not know, but your co-worker gets it and you get tested and guess what, you just got two weeks of quarantine. Good chance your whole family gets told to hunker down even though you haven’t actually had it for a couple months.
It gets so hard to know the correct answers, they more who get it, the more undetected ones we will find also. I am not as surprised as others with a spike this last week, I expected it before the reports is the parties happened. Situations like this always become self-fulfilling prophecies. If there are 3x as many cases as there are positives, that would throw us around 2000-2500 probably. I believe the numbers will drop after this week. Then things will start to even out. Just my thoughts.
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But there were 60,000-ish people in Story County prior to the students coming, and we were at 247 cases on 8/14. You would expect to only see the rate go up by an additional 50% of that number if you were adding in people acting similarly (or roughly 124 additional positives). But it’s not, it’s gone up now to 1197 just yesterday, which is an increase of about 485% over the 247. Considering those students were all tested when they came onsite and there were only ~130 positives at the time, I don’t think that the part about potentially being positive up to three months after is relevant other than for maybe 130 of them.
I don’t think anyone should have been surprised by this, either. Even if there weren’t parties (which is laughable), students by nature live in close quarters and have more community spaces. Most students interact with the community in some nature, so there is going to be community spread from them that will be trickling down coming up. Combined with the football game and Labor Day, if we use the increases around Memorial Day and the 4th as predictive (which would be a fair assessment), I think we’ll see spikes again in about 2.5 to 3 weeks.
I totally get the desire for optimism, but again – the NYT numbers are not arguable by Wintersteen. They’re just flat-out not about ISU.
Self-edit – up to 1214 today, per the Iowa COVID tracker that has been fluctuating pretty wildly lately.
To me this is much like the “I’m not going to mandate masks because I trust Iowan’s to do the right thing”… we see how that has gone.
[QUOTE=”CyTwins, post: 7296266, member: 9368″]
Still not moving the needle nationally
[/QUOTE]
K
[QUOTE=”CyTwins, post: 7296266, member: 9368″]
Still not moving the needle nationally
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It is this week. Not sure how long it’ll last though. If it causes a surge we will hear about it again briefly but if it doesn’t, it’ll fade out. Their attention span isn’t very long.