Players and staff members are reporting today in order to re-launch the 2020 season. The first order of business will be coronavirus check-in testing.
One important member of the Cubs organization won’t be anxiously awaiting the results of his test. Pitching coach Tommy Hottovy has already endured a bout with COVID-19, he tells 670 The Score’s Mully and Haugh (h/t Mark Gonzales of the Chicago Tribune, via Twitter).
While Hottovy is no longer positive for the virus, he says he is still not fully back to himself. He’s through the worst of it, which required some time in the hospital, but is still struggling with lung function and cardiovascular fitness.
In yet another reminder of how insidious this particular disease can be, Hottovy says he had acted quite cautiously in public before coming down with it. Fortunately, he was able to self-isolate and avoid transmitting it to his family.
Hottovy was able to work with Cubs pitchers remotely even while battling the infection, so he’s ready to hit the ground running. He says the organization’s hurlers worked hard during the lockdown and should be well-prepared to tackle the 2020 campaign.
He’s 38 years old and a former professional athlete. I guess it can bite anyone. And even in the summer. My worry about this is the compromised lung function and cardiovascular fitness impact. Any professional athlete cannot afford to be compromised and still perform. Yes. you can isolate for 14 days so you don’t transmit the virus, but who knows about the longer impact it will have, which is likely unique and different for everybody.
Insane. In a city of 140,000 and the hospitals empty. Wheres all these thousands and thousands of new cases.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth….
Good news for your town, Ironman. Where are you?
i hope these governors at least own the elective surgery thing, because my mom works in a hospital and the hpspital system (multiple local hospitals) has only ever seen a few extra COVID-19 patients a day. not saying this is the same case everywhere, but putting people’s non-COVID conditions on hold to essentially make hospitals less full is absurd.
DarkSide…an appropriate screen name. 40,000 new cases today, and going up steeply. Though your area may be unaffected now, it won’t be for that much longer. Are you actually willing to sacrifice your parents and grandparents for the sake of sports? This is not just about the hospitals. It’s about human beings.
It all depends on location. Texas Governor has put on hold elective surgery in the most densely populated counties, Harris, Dallas, Bexar, and others where hospital capacity is limited due to the virus. Some counties in Texas have few if any cases.
im not saying the disease exists or is dangerous, im meerly saying the hospitals filling up hasnt happened, which is something that annoys me. that they told people “you cant have this surgery right now because it isnt important enough” and then the space is there is not a good look. and its not just this area, ive heard this same thing a lot. and this system isnt just any system, its right adjacent to Philadelphia where the cases only somewhat ever slowed down.
Maybe in freeing up capacity by stopping non emergency procedures they are producing extra manpower capacity will allow some of those nurses and doctors to travel to the most affected areas to help out. NY, NJ, CT and even Philadelphia benefited greatly from those out of state medical professionals that were able to come in to provide the much needed support when the pandemic was at its peak in those locations.
OK, I misunderstood. Thanks for elaborating.
Hospitals not filling up eh?
nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1232640
Now, go back to whatever rock you live under where just because it didn’t happen you you it isn’t happening in the world.
It may not be just to keep space free. Trying to recover at a hospital during a potential outbreak seems like a bad idea:
Ask yourself how serious is this disease when less than 1% of the people die after they become infected and we haven’t seen any major figures or politicians die from this disease. It doesn’t help that a five year old could run their states better than some of these buffoons they call governors.
Was this even supposed to make any sense?
@whynot
Nice try. I live in NY. My wife is an RN. Upstate hospitals were laying off doctors, nurses, admin, etc by the THOUSANDS. There was never a shortage of medical professionals. Not even in NYC during the worst part of it. There was never a shortage of beds either. I personally know people who died from conditions completely unrelated to COVID because they couldn’t get in to an empty hospital for the treatment they needed.
Testing has gone up dramatically also showing that there’s more cases but there’s less hospitalization and less deaths. Pray nobody gets this hideous disease but let’s be factual
The percentage of tests coming back positive is up dramatically, and that’s the real cause for alarm. Hospitalizations lag the infection rate by five days to two weeks, as do deaths. I mean, while we are being factual.
A lot of dense people live in those counties
I call BS. Even in normal times, a city of 140,000 would not have empty hospitals.
i agree!
No this is legit. I live in a town about the same size. Our hospitals are empty. A lot of hospital employees have had their hours cut or are furloughed. My next door neighbor is an ER doctor in 3 area hospitals. He rotates through them on the night shift he hasn’t been scheduled at 2 out of the 3 in close to two months. He’s doing some tele-doc work but it doesn’t come close to what he was doing hours-wise before. Our town at one point was a CDC hotspot because of the number of cases, the hospital was never even close to its usual filled beds.
I’m not saying there hasn’t been filled hospitals and I’m not saying the spikes aren’t real at all. I’m just saying it’s not the same every where.
You’re also missing the point you’re right in normal times the hospital is far from empty. But 2 things are happening, first there was a ban on elective surgeries. Second people are terrified to go to the hospital. Another neighbor is a cardiologist, he said no one is coming in for chest pains they’re coming in an ambulance after the heart attack.
@Ironman
In my city, the hospitals, in May, were overwhelmed. My local convenience store donated a freezer truck to help store the dead bodies that were piling up. That is not a joke or an exaggeration. It happened. It happened in my own town.
Right now, my state is showing a downturn, thank god, because 90% of people wore masks, social distanced, and stayed home.
Now, because they re-opened too soon, other states may see this happen to them.
How about 18 months without playing with full effort? How much does that compromise their ability to perform?
Also, Hottovy is the exception, not the rule. Right, it can hit anybody, but even in this anomalous severe case, there was a brief hospital stay and an eventual recovery.
So he’s the exception because you know the rule. My father had a PhD in Biochemistry from MIT and a Fellowship at Harvard Medical before he was even 25 years old. I wonder what your qualifications are. Please. Just shut up.
But can your dad beat up his dad? That’s the rule of dads.
Except he hasn’t recovered and might never be what he was before…
@RenButt
You clearly didn’t read the article. Even right here it says he is still struggling with lung function. All research suggests that even those who recover might have to live with lingering effects the rest of their lives.
This isn’t like the flu, where you take some meds, get better, and go back to normal.
Over the last few months the deniers have changed their argument from “it’s just a bad cold” to “no worse than the flu,” to “not much worse than the flu.” Next it will have to be “not as bad as the Spanish flu,” and after that no doubt, “the typhoid plagues were far worse.” Avoiding the truth at any cost.
BlueSkies: Ikr! Eventually: “Until it kills a third of Europe like the bubonic plague, we should keep the bars open! Life goes on!”
WiffleBall: This clown has been pushing his COVID-denial talking points since March. I would just ignore him.
Life goes on… until it doesn’t. We’re all going to die of something, right? I mean most of the people who’ve died from coronavirus, they were old or sick and were going to die pretty soon anyway. So who cares?
I wish I was just being facetious but I’ve heard that exact opinion expressed here many times. I’d call the people who make them cold-hearted SOBs but I’m sure they’d take it as a complement.
ironman and other deniers are bots that scour the internet for key words like “virus” and “lungs,” etc. Then they generate b.s. comments. The bots are located on Russian, Chinese and North Korean servers; according to mainstream news sources.
BlueSkies, you’re a horrible person. They were going to die soon, so who cares, really? In the grand scheme of the universe, we’re all going to die soon, so who cares?
You can tell you haven’t lost anyone close to you. You’ll write a fake story about losing a brother or something in response to this, but you clearly don’t understand what it’s like to lose a loved one. Truly sad that not only do you feel this way, but you felt the need to express it out loud to strangers. Disgusting. Not every thought you have needs broadcast on the internet.
herecomethephillies… Did you read his second paragraph before you spewed?
Thank you. Maybe he doesn’t understand the meaning of the word facetious.
But I thought it’s a hoax? I thought it’s no worse than the flu? I thought it only affects the elderly? I thought it’s no big deal!
at this point, all coviditiots have is shifting the goalposts, because they have been proven wrong so many times (but hey, at this point, if 1 million of them want to die from this, i am all for it. anything that gets these people off the planet and away from the voting booth is a win-win, full stop).
Not a hoax, but completely overblown. In my county, there have been 288 positive cases to date, with 6 hospitalizations and 2 deaths (both elderly with depressed immune systems.) How is this much different from the norm, other than the constant hype? It definitely isn’t worth the economic toll it has taken on a significant portion of the population.
There will always be outliers of course, but do we need to do an article on the many more folks who had mild to no symptoms and have recovered?
And yet another source of disinformation.
The information I provided you is accurate, per the county public health website.
You conspicuously don’t say what county, but it hardly matters. No matter how many cases you’ve seen to date wherever you happen to live, understand that no part of the country is immune. The “outlier” is the U.S. as a whole, with less than 5% of the world’s population and over 25% of the world’s deaths. Wanting to talk about the number of people who’ve “recovered” is only a way of avoiding talking about the number who will die, which if it is only 0.5% of the population, is well over a million Americans. Is that starting to sound real to you yet?
Did I say immune? No, nobody is immune. And it isn’t any more real than the flu death percentage. And avoiding the people who have “recovered” is also short-sighted.
We will all get it, like every other influenza, mers, and coronavirus. That is what the immune system does. And it will continue to mutate, no matter the vaccine.
But go live in your shell if it makes you feel better.
A lack of context amounts to misinformation. Are you in a rural county in a state with a low population or a suburban county is a mid population state? That kind of data will influence how the data is interpreted. Upstate NY was hardly affected yet, NYC was a different story, you only had to drive 3 hours to see a start contrast
What part of over a million deaths are you having difficultly understanding?
You are a fine one to talk about others living in a shell. Some of us understand what is going on, and you can’t seem to address yourself to the most basic facts.
you also answered back several times, without ever providing a link or telling anyone the county in question.
turns out when you hide evidence, you can make up your own “facts” (as you have shown to be the case).
numbers are misinformation?
What part of over a million deaths are you having difficultly understanding?
BlueSkies, just above you said “it’s only old people dying, and I hate to say this but who cares?” Now you’re preaching to people about a million deaths and they need to take it seriously?
Get a life and quit jumping around just playing devil’s advocate. You’re disgusting.
This has to be one of the most embarrassing and painful posts I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading on these boards, and that’s saying a lot. Instead of jumping on the nearest high horse you might actually try reading what was said first.
I don’t think the families of the 130,000+, and counting, who have died, think it is overblown. My parents are elderly, with underlying health issues, that make them for vulnerable. I’m guessing you don’t have anyone you care about in that position. It changes how a person feels about this, for sure.
‘More’, not ‘for’
My mother had stage 4 glioblastoma, and if you know what that is then you know it’s a death sentence. We had to be very careful with our surroundings and who came into contact due to her immune system being depleted. I have elderly family and friends who are still around, and to say I don’t care is just false.
But didn’t we care prior to all of this? Is it new that those with depressed immune systems are vulnerable? What do we do in the fall when flu season hits and now you have many more people wondering what they have?
If we follow the current play of lockdowns, then the fall is going to be a disaster for the financial being of families and the economy as a whole.
We would not need the lockdowns if we had a national strategy for dealing with outbreaks, and if huge numbers of Americans weren’t flaunting social distancing requirements, and refusing to cover their faces, for no other reason but to make some sort of moronic political statement. This is why we will probably be looking at 300,000 deaths by the end of the year and potentially well over a million by the end of next year, if we don’t get a vaccine before then.
Marte, it is a false choice to think that we can’t go about living our lives while also trying to protect the vulnerable. Don’t make it sound like everyone who wants to lead their lives is trying to shove granny (or mom) over a cliff!
Speaking of false choices, it is hyperbole to make it sound like anyone has talked about shoving granny over a cliff. What we do hear, and quite often, is that the people who die from this virus were mostly old or sick and probably would have died soon anyway. Less colorful language, but much the same result.
I will say it: if you think everyone should just go back to work, it means you’re ok with shoving granny over a cliff.
Work from home if you can. Stay home whenever possible. Once again, the US is suffering more than others because our culture shuns collectivism. Because we are being asked to care about other people and simply refuse to do so.
And so your county represents the entire country? F*CK OFF.
Sending Prayers