When will the COVID-19 Worlds Announcement be?

lacsap · March 9, 2020, 11:38am

Can you rename this topic? Clearly there is no announcement.

@DRow

4869Robotics · March 9, 2020, 12:22pm

@DRow remove this there is no announcement

bossgivol · March 9, 2020, 1:07pm

I heard a rumor the announcement will be made to day. However, this topic is complelty misleading @DRow

Brandon_Martus · March 9, 2020, 1:54pm

I’ve updated the topic title.

Grape · March 9, 2020, 2:46pm

Honestly, this was just to answer my question because I am very impatient (guilty) and anticipating the announcement. I didn’t mean for it to become another rumor mill, let’s just leave the question as answered so other can refer to this.
(Also I’m not going to make one of the answers the solution to the question because they all have different relevant info.)

Foster · March 9, 2020, 3:15pm

Rumor mill is a great place for this, it’s fine.

helpfulalumni · March 10, 2020, 4:01am

Our worlds qualifier was postponed indefinitely

JD6 · March 10, 2020, 10:59am

where was it to be held?

RNA · March 10, 2020, 11:03am

Louisville Kentucky is where worlds is held at this year.

JD6 · March 10, 2020, 11:29am

I meant where was the qualifying event. Like where was the event that got cancelled?

lacsap · March 10, 2020, 11:40am

The first post after your post is the correct solution.

RNA · March 10, 2020, 12:00pm

Ah. Nevermind then sorry

robots_AU · March 10, 2020, 10:17pm

I understand yes that Dan will get to us, but as an international team, time is everything at the moment and this wait is excruciating. Bravo to those that are able to wait patiently. I really hope that there is a response soon, my guess is that with the ever changing climate, that an announcement that made sense Fri no longer is viable Monday. I feel for those making decisions, it is challenging times.

technik3k · March 11, 2020, 1:17am

I guess RECF is waiting until the last moment for various reasons.

They may have originally wanted to give teams who are going to states this weekend, a chance to play without knowing that Worlds have been already canceled.

They may have been waiting for the Louisville, Kentucky, or Federal government to issue an official no-go directive, which may let RECF an easier way out of the EXPO contract.

They may have been still hoping that COVID-19 could somehow stabilize in the coming weeks…

It seems that everybody on the the multiple levels of government are playing chicken, hoping or pretending that in a few weeks they could still somehow return to business as usual and still have big events like Kentucky Derby, VEX Worlds, etc…

After reading news for the last few days and observing how rapidly our local school district officials have reversed they stance from “don’t worry we are just in the monitoring phase” to “absolutely no school based travel and there will be no penalties if you don’t come to school starting tomorrow”, I pretty much convinced that there won’t even be “come at your own risk” Worlds and, most likely, no US Open either.

This article is a short read and it summarizes the current state of COVID-19 epidemic very well:

By Megan McArdle

There’s an old brain teaser that goes like this: You have a pond of a certain size, and upon that pond, a single lilypad. This particular species of lily pad reproduces once a day, so that on day two, you have two lily pads. On day three, you have four, and so on.

Now the teaser. “If it takes the lily pads 48 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take for the pond to be covered halfway?”

The answer is 47 days. Moreover, at day 40, you’ll barely know the lily pads are there.

That grim math explains why so many people — including me — are worried about the novel coronavirus, which causes a disease known as covid-19. And why so many other people think we are panicking over nothing.

During the current flu season, they point out, more than 250,000 people have been hospitalized in the United States, and 14,000 have died, including more than 100 children. As of this writing, the coronavirus has killed 29 people, and our caseload is in the hundreds. Why are we freaking out about the tiny threat while ignoring the big one?

Quite a number of people have suggested that it’s because the media just wants President Trump to look bad. Trump seems particularly fond of this suggestion.

But go back to those lily pads: When something dangerous is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t. In the early days of the Wuhan epidemic, when no one was taking precautions, the number of cases appears to have doubled every four to five days.

The crisis in northern Italy is what happens when a fast doubling rate meets a “threshold effect,” where the character of an event can massively change once its size hits a certain threshold.

In this case, the threshold is things such as ICU beds. If the epidemic is small enough, doctors can provide respiratory support to the significant fraction of patients who develop complications, and relatively few will die. But once the number of critical patients exceeds the number of ventilators and ICU beds and other critical-care facilities, mortality rates spike.

Daniele Macchini, a doctor in Bergamo, Italy, recently posted a heart-stopping account to Facebook of what he and his colleagues have endured: the hospital emptying out, the wards eerily silent as they waited for the patients they couldn’t quite believe would come … and then, the “tsunami.”

“One after the other the departments that had been emptied fill up at an impressive pace. … The boards with the names of the patients, of different colors depending on the operating unit, are now all red and instead of surgery you see the diagnosis, which is always the damned same: bilateral interstitial pneumonia.”

A British health-care worker shared a message from a doctor in Italy, who alleged that covid-19 patients in their hospital who are over 65, or have complicating conditions, aren’t even being considered for the most intensive forms of supportive treatment.

The experts are telling us that here in the United States, we can avoid hitting that threshold where sizable regions of the country will suddenly step into hell. We still have time to #flattenthecurve, as a popular infographic put it, slowing the spread so that the number of cases never exceeds what our health system can handle. The United States has an unusually high number of ICU beds, which gives us a head start. But we mustn’t squander that advantage through complacency.

So everyone needs to understand a few things.

First, the virus is here, and it is spreading quickly, even though everything looks normal. Right now, the United States has more reported cases than Italy had in late February. What matters isn’t what you can see but what you can’t: the patients who will need ICU care in two to six weeks.

Second, this is not “a bad flu.” It kills more of its hosts, and it will spread farther unless we take aggressive steps to slow it down, because no one is yet immune to this disease . It will be quite some time before the virus runs out of new patients.

Third, we can fight it. Despite early exposure, Singapore and Hong Kong have kept their caseloads low, not by completely shutting down large swaths of their economies as China did but through aggressive personal hygiene and “social distancing.” South Korea seems to be getting its initial outbreak under control using similar measures. If we do the same, we can not only keep our hospitals from overloading but also buy researchers time to develop vaccines and therapies.

Fourth, and most important: We are all in this together. It is your responsibility to keep America safe by following the CDC guidelines, just as much as it is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s or President Trump’s responsibility to lead us to safety. And until this virus is beaten, we all need to act like it.

meepmeepme · March 11, 2020, 6:33am

Worlds isn’t canceled. As of now, Dan Mantz and the RECF have not made any announcement as to what will happen, who can go, and what procedures will be in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Any other information that you see is simply false! Only trust official vex forum posts by Dan Mantz, RECF emails, or the robot events website. Thank you and have a nice day!

destiny · March 11, 2020, 1:26pm

i know there hasn’t been a statement yet but i mean there’s a case in louisville and i don’t think rec would wanna put anyone in jeopardy

Logan10622D · March 11, 2020, 2:04pm

I do believe the announcement will be today actually

LordVader5 · March 11, 2020, 2:13pm

Our district in Colorado cancelled all out of state travel 2 days ago. Since then I have seen on the forums and the VEX World Coaches Facebook page that teams from all of the following states have reported the same thing. Some teams are even reporting cancelations or postponements of state tournaments. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Maryland, Los Angeles, Georgia, Florida, New York, and us in Colorado. Not to mention all of the countries that can’t make it.

There has also been quite the discussion about students not getting sick from covid-19 so they will be fine. One of our students has a medical condition that parents and doctors cannot figure out. He has been in and out of school all year. So we have no idea what could happen to him should any of the rest of us be exposed. It’s not only the elderly we are concerned about but one of our own 12 year olds.

Stay safe. Stay smart. Stay healthy. Life goes on and in the end we are all teaching our students to be lifelong learners and engineers. Not just winning trophies and traveling to Louisville, Kentucky.

DRow · March 11, 2020, 2:36pm

Railgunawesome · March 11, 2020, 3:59pm

Should we lock all the “When will Covid announcements be?” threads