Dan,

Thanks for the article.

It's an extraordinarily complicated situation. As we sit here mid January - It's fair to say that no one really knows what's going to be happening this year.

In Canada, because of geography our Triathlon Race Season is very short. Essentially June 1 - Mid-Sept. This is speculation, but with my work for the Canadian Endurance Sports Alliance - CESA - https://www.endurancesportsalliance.ca/ and talking to EVERY major running, cycling and triathlon race/event organizer from Coast-to-Coast in the past few months, many politicians, health officials and others, speaking speculatively here, I would be surprised if we have anything close to a "normal" triathlon season in Canada. The bigger the race - the more vulnerable it is. The word on the street, from Race Directors I have spoken to, is they are getting Absolutely NO WAY from municipalities regarding permits (Now is when they are usually negotiated). Makes sense - right now in most parts of the country only 5, yes that's right FIVE people can gather together outside!!

There may be a few micro small time-trial kind of races/events with pretty heavy protocols and social distancing measures in place in the summer - but that might be it.

Vaccination which has been brought up here, will be of little help for THIS year - it's really a 2022 solution for the Endurance Sports Race/Event Business in Canada. The roll out of the vaccines here will be from what I have seen already VERY methodical - in other words if you are healthy fit, are not immuno-compromised, and not a front line healthcare worker . . we will be the LAST to be vaccinated. No queue jumping!

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

HITS Sarasota was a great race this past weekend. A bit chilly (temps in the 40s to 50s) but a well run race.

147 finishers in the sprint, 92 in the Olympic and 50 finished the half.

i think it's going to be a more rural phenomenon, where cities and large counties are less a part of the permitting process. and i'm talking more in the U.S., where public health decisions are less federally centralized. in the U.S., the issue is polarized into an A/B decision, with A saying, "so you don't believe in science," and B saying, "so you're fine with seeing entire communities financially self-immolate."

in the U.S. what i perceive is that public health officials are right in the science, but not always right in the policy decisions. for example, i think the majority of those in public health believe in withholding the 2nd dose, keeping it in abeyance for those who've gotten the 1st dose, but this is public health trying to make a manufacturing and logistics decision, which is not public health's wheelhouse.

here in the U.S. i think these decisions about public health and our events that matter a lot to resort communities are more nuanced. if we are able to vaccinate over half our population by the first half of the year, what is the reasoning behind withholding permits for races in august thru november? it may be different in canada for a number of reasons, but i would be shocked if we're not racing full tilt by september, with a crammed calendar of events taking place beginning in july and ending in november.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

an anecdote...I went to an Ikea last Saturday in oak creek Wisconsin. It was 100% above board, legal, and in compliance with local health 'guidelines' set forth in a blue county in a blue state. still an extremely dumb idea.

There were easily 3-4000 people, milling about, indoors. Almost all wore masks, but we each went about our way, each funneling through the showroom labyrinth, 3-5 abreast, before congregating again en masse in the checkout line. All in the name of modular furniture and cheap homewares.

The same milwaukee county that is home to that particular Ikea will not permit 100 person outdoor 5ks right now based on guidelines limiting course density and the optics of outdoor events. Neither will my hometown/ county of Madison/ Dane County, home of Ironman, WI.

Inconsistent/ Incoherent public health guidelines (and their application) by large cities and counties would make me bet against any races that aren't in mid or small town venues in q1/q2. Q3 is questionable. But the pain in hospitality, event production, and tourism very real. I suspect restrictive policies will thaw here as the weather does.

as we all know, in-person shopping for modular furniture is of vital national import.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Just to clarify, the vaccine trials did not assess how much less likely vaccinated individuals are to infect others. I think we can assume that there's some reduction in infectiousness. But we don't know for sure, we are still waiting for data, and right now I would prefer to act as if there is no reduction in infectiousness.

Also, we think the vaccine is about 90% efficacious, so don't forget that you could be in the 10% of people for whom it is not efficacious, and someone you run into could be as well.

Can you help educate us on how some of this logic works and qualify it please with who you are and credentials (I am not questioning it, but its better if the statement is from a qualified identifiable person given all the misinformation that can flow around on internet message boards)

Question 1:

If the vaccine is 90% effective, does this mean there is a 90% chance that I will not get Covid19. If I don't have it, I can't give it to someone else. There is a 10% chance I get it which means I can give it to someone else but the chance of giving it to someone else dropped by 90% compared to not vaccinated.

Question 2


Or is it 90% effective in ensuring that I don't get sick, but 0 percent chance of preventing me from getting it to some degree when I get exposed enough. So once I get it, how badly does it hammer me? But the vaccine itself is trying to minimize the impact on me, not shut the door for the virus on my body. If I get it I have 90% chance of not getting sick, but I still have it and can give to others?

Is this what you are getting at? I just assumed that those vaccinated will not give it to others just like those of us who got vaccinated from small pox could no longer give it to others since we would not get sick from it (but that was a totally different mechanism).

The spring mountain bike racing season started last weekend in Phoenix. The first race in the MBAA series was held over a 2 day period. Probably 600-700 total entrants in all categories. I did the 43 mile race - for almost the entire race I could not see another competitor. It was well organized with masks required in the start chute, athletes spaced out, double the normal starting groups, social distancing in check in, scanners for check in, no awards ceremony, team areas with lots of space, etc. The Cactus Cup, a big local event, will be in March. There will be a local tri on Feb 28 with on road and off road categories (Iceman Tri). Is it safe? I don't know but I hope so. AZ has one of the highest case rates in the country.

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Andrew Inkpen

Unfortunately, OP may still be able to contract and spread COVID-19, even though they received both doses.

The studies tout a 90% efficacy rate with this vaccine, but we will have to wait and see how that translates to real world efficiency.

My guess would be SOME towns will return to regular racing in the spring as usual (NOT IM) if you are willing to take the risk. I am not.

Some towns there peope at bars, restaurants etc. Zero social distancing nor masks required

I have a Master's degree in public health, and I'm a current PhD candidate. Actually, I am not an epidemiologist, which is the field that would deal directly with this (assuming they are infectious disease epidemiologists, anyway; note that not all of them specialize in infectious diseases). My bread and butter is clinical effectiveness, though, so I understand the basics.

In the randomized trials, the vaccine arm was around 90% less likely to get COVID than the placebo arm. Here's one of the RCTs. I haven't gone deep into this one or others, but in this one, "to get COVID" means that you had COVID symptoms and you got a positive PCR test (they stick a swab into your nose, then they stick that into a machine that replicates the virus' RNA or whatever it is, basically testing for an active infection). So, this is confirmed, symptomatic COVID.

So, to be really precise, it may be that you could still get asymptomatic COVID, not get any symptoms, but you still have enough of a viral load (amount of virus in, say, your nasal passages) to spread it. I don't have any clinical training, but I would assume that if you have the vaccine, your immune system responds much faster and more effectively to the virus. So, it stands to reason that your viral load would be lower if you got exposed to the virus. Maybe its near zero, and thus you are basically incapable of infecting anyone! But maybe not. Basically, does the vaccine just block symptoms, or does it actually make you shed so little virus that you aren't infectious?

We don't know this part. All we know is that compared to someone not vaccinated, you are 90% or more less likely to get symptomatic COVID.

Thus, out of an abundance of caution, once they vaccinate me, I intend to assume I could still get an asymptomatic but contagious infection. Naturally, I could also get symptomatic and infectious as well. I'm not going to live like a hermit for the rest of time, because nobody can. I would still urge people to be as cautious as they can sustain for the next year. We'll know more as time goes by, and we will certainly be able to lift the restrictions at some point. It's just that we have lost over 380,000 people here in the US.

Thanks, I think fundamentally what you explained confirms what I understood, but wanted to see the angle you were coming from. Until all of this is deployed in the real world, in decent volume we won't know the full effect, and thus I also agree that we should still maintain all the measures between ourselves in high risk scenarios. But I think that once I am vaccinated I am going to feel like I literally won't be able to give it to anyone given that the probability will go way down AND I will still behave like I have it, until its gone to the level in society of any other infectious disease that we all live with (and in theory we all spread them, its just not that big a deal and not hurting anyone with high probability of bad outcome)

Here’s hoping USMS Open Water Nationals happen in TX in May! That’s all I want to do this year.

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"The person on top of the mountain didn't fall there." - unkown

also rule 5

My local club here in Western Australia had a race the weekend before Christmas and another in Busselton on Sunday. No masks or covid restrictions here. Well there is no covid so there’s that too...

Unfortunately, this does bring up another issue. I don't know what the end game for COVID looks like. One infectious diseases person I know peripherally on Facebook said she doesn't expect we can eliminate COVID in the US (this means the disease no longer circulates within certain communities, even if it does still exist somewhere on the planet, e.g. I was dismayed to hear that the US just barely held on to its measles elimination status in 2019, and some European countries lost that status) in the next 5 years or so. It would be possible with a lot of money and political will, and we definitely haven't shown the latter.

Remember that COVID's basic parameters - how infectious it is, how sick it makes you, and how likely it is to kill you - are like the flu virus if you put that virus on Lance Armstrong's regimen. We do have an advantage in that the COVID vaccine is much more efficacious than the flu vaccine. However, COVID does mutate. It's in the same class of virus (I think) as the flu virus, and we know the flu virus mutates, and we have seen some significant COVID mutations already. The current expectation is that the vaccine should be equally efficacious against the new UK strain. This may change, although nobody hopes that this happens.

In light of the above, my read of my acquaintance's statement is that it's likely to be quite some time before we should not worry about it (more than we would worry about, say, the flu). Due to fatigue, we may accept the risk, but we will be losing more people than we should.

All this is complex @$%*. This is why we train masters and doctoral level public health people. This is why it is worth it to train them (well, people like me). But unfortunately, it's one thing to have the experts, and it's another thing to convince society to go along. And also, experts aren't perfect either, it takes time for knowledge to disseminate (e.g. public health experts in the US initially were initially skeptical of masks because no direct experience with SARS, but public health experts in East Asia had experience with them), sometimes we're wrong, sometimes the models aren't perfect, etc.

I'm optimistic and really hope that will be the case but I certainly won't be shocked if it's not. We've made great progress in 10 months with the vaccine, but until most are vaccinated there are still a lot of unknowns. Go back and read the comments here in March and April regarding C19. Most didn't do a good job in predicting the future six months out. I know we have a lot more knowledge of C19 than we did then but...

I plan to sign up for the local tri series this summer as soon as registration opens at the end of the month. I plan to get vaccinated as soon as I'm given the opportunity.

Well I think you hit it on the head with this as most of this is optics and politics right now. In everyone’s defense though it cannot be easy with a virus we still don’t know a lot about. I am starting to believe the secondary and maybe even primary cost of covid is social isolation and not having races does not help with that.

But if course I can go to IKEA:).

As expected, certainly not in mid March at PR70.3 2021.

Announcement just came to my email....

The 2021 Puerto Rico 70.3 was just cancelled yesterday, so it seems the 2021 cancellations have begun in the U.S. I'm glad they gave us 2+ months notice.

I'm in Kentucky and the Governor's Office says vaccination of 16-40 year olds is scheduled for Summer of 2021. In other words,the bulk of the population won't be vaccinated until Fall of 2021.

Personally I won't feel comfortable racing until I'm vaccinated. Why anyone would is questionable at best. I'm also hoping most others at the event will be vaccinated.

With that said, I have an IM 70.3 on July 20th and another one on October 23rd. I'm hoping IM defers races until September 2021. I'd like to see them get ahead of it and announce something to be proactive. It would help out the athletes.

ugh what a bummer but understandable. We did this race in 2017 and LOVED it!! (before Maria). They have been through so much and I hope this race will be postponed at some point. I can't say enough good things about our race experience in PR that year. It's a gem!

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Death is easy....peaceful. Life is harder.

It means there is a 90% chance that you will not get covid symptoms. That does not mean that you cannot be a carrier.



The second thing. They looked at if people in the trial got sick. Then they checked to see if the sick people got the vaccine or the placebo. They did not check to see if people in close contact with those who received the vaccine got sick.

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Janyne

I'm going out on a limb, but I'm 95% sure that IM Canada will not take place this year. It's late August, but still, there won't be enough people vaccinated by then.

What's everyone's thoughts on the chances of placid going off in late July?
A month ago I was pretty confident but this slow roll out has me wondering.

I think it's going to be a close call for July races in the northeast of the US. I'm doing Musselman 70.3 on July 11 and a little worried I may not be vaccinated by then. I just heard on NRP that Biden is planning on this huge rollout to get people vaccinated quicker. He mentioned hiring 100K health pros (if I heard that correctly) and setting up more centers to get vaccinated. Will it really happen? Who knows? We have never had to vaccinate an entire population in the modern world and govt doesn't always move as quickly as we need and desire. So again, it's so hard to tell what will happen in July.

I think if we all want to race, let's all do our best to be safe and keep others safe. Goes w/o saying but it's really crazy that 10 months into this pandemic, many parts of the world are on fire with this virus.

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Death is easy....peaceful. Life is harder.