On March 17, my favorite NBA player, Steph Curry shot a 3-pointer and then, as is his wont, backpedalled. The problem: he was backpedalling off the sideline instead of down the court and there was no barrier to stop him. In a normal game, there would have been some normal barrier to stop his going backward, whether the barrier be other chairs that players were sitting on or something else.
But because of Covid cautions, there are large spaces between chairs and so as Steph went backward, he didn’t stop until his tail bone came in hard contact with some metal stairs. Go to this link and page down to the 38-second video if you want to see what happened. But be prepared to watch something painful.
Why do I highlight this in an economics blog? Because it illustrates in microcosm the failure to make reasonable tradeoffs to deal with Covid-19. We know that Covid-19 is not particularly risky for young people and especially for young people without co-morbidities. NBA players are not a random sample; their physical fitness certainly puts them in the top 1 percent and maybe even in the top 0.1 percent of people their age, let alone of all ages. (And maybe in the top 0.01 percent.) The probability that Steph Curry would get badly sick from Covid, even if he didn’t get the shot, is really low. But the NBA did not make the tradeoffs the way I would have. I’m not challenging their right to do so: it’s their arena, pun not intended. I’m challenging the bad thinking behind their decision.
We often hear from the behavioral economists like Richard Thaler and behavioral legal scholars like Cass Sunstein about “availability bias.” The idea is that people pay attention to what’s most prominent, not to what’s most likely. Where oh where are Thaler and Sunstein? Shouldn’t this be their moment to shine by pointing out how absurd some of these policies are?
READER COMMENTS
Rob Rawlings
Mar 29 2021 at 9:06pm
My view of the video is that he fell back onto some metal stairs that would have been there even without covid restrictions. Did I mis-view it ?
In any case I assume that the NBA would (in as much as they are not just following government mandates – I think that some team’s aren’t allowed to have fans present at all, or are mandated as to how many they can allow) base their attendance policy on fan safety (and fan concerns about safety) as well as player safety in which case attendance restrictions may be justified if an additional small risk of player safety led to fans feeling more safe.
Rob Rawlings
Mar 29 2021 at 9:19pm
Oh, I see David says ‘In a normal game, there would have been some normal barrier to stop his going backward’. But, I suppose if the NBA were worried about this kind of player safety issue then appropriate barriers would still be possible even with restricted fans in attendance .
David Henderson
Mar 29 2021 at 10:05pm
You wrote:
Exactly. But instead they worry about the more-visible threat and don’t think through more likely threats to players.
Dylan
Mar 30 2021 at 7:41am
David,
I think you might be making the same error of focusing on the seen (deaths and hospitalizations rates for young people) and ignoring the unseen where early evidence has pointed to higher rates of myocarditis in athletes that have had covid, even asymptomatic cases. More recent and larger trials* seem to suggest that there isn’t as big of an impact as feared, but smaller trials and anecdotal cases were a cause of worry, as lots of very healthy people have had covid and then have had shortness of breath for months just climbing the stairs.
*Also another data point that there is no substitute for large, randomized clinical trials when you’re trying to figure out what is going on in the human body.
robc
Mar 30 2021 at 8:49am
I think both college football and professional sports worldwide, which have had a huge number of positive cases, has shown the myocarditis issue is effectively nil. You sort of said that, but the question is why was it ever a worry to begin with? Based on one or two cases?
Dylan
Mar 30 2021 at 1:21pm
This article talks about one study that showed myocarditis in 15% of the college athletes they tested with MRI and another 31% had fibrosis of the cardiac tissue. These were all athletes that had tested positive for Covid, but either had mild symptoms or were asymptomatic. I’ve read of other observational studies with similar findings. There are also supposedly mechanistic reasons why we would expect top athletes to have more severe response than the rest of us…but I’m not smart enough to understand the causal pathways that a cardiologist tried to explain to me a few months back.
I would say, there has been a lot more than just one or two cases. I’ve had a lot of friends that had Covid last spring and were of the serious athletes/marathon runner type and many haven’t been able to get back to where they were yet. One friend used to run 10-15 miles a few times a week, after getting Covid, she would get winded super easily. She only started running again at the beginning of the year, and last I heard she can’t do more than 1 or 2 miles now. Another friend had been doing 1 or 2 marathons a year for the last 6 or 7 years, she’s recovered quicker, but still hasn’t been able to run 10 miles at a stretch and it has been almost a year since she had Covid. Have heard a lot of stories like that about people that I don’t know as well that had previously been in excellent health.
Per Kurowski
Mar 30 2021 at 5:28pm
Where were the behavioralists when it came to risk weighted bank capital requirements?
https://subprimeregulations.blogspot.com/2021/01/might-availability-heuristic.html
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