Jaden McDaniels will miss Timberwolves’ regular-season opener

posted in: News | 0

The Timberwolves will be down a starter when they opens the NBA season Wednesday night in Toronto against the Raptors.

Jaden McDaniels, who signed a five-year extension worth $131 million on Monday, will miss the regular-season opener with the calf strain suffered in Abu Dhabi that has kept him out of much of training camp.

The 23-year-old defensive stopper resumed 5-on-0 work this week. The team said McDaniels’ status “will be evaluated day-to-day” moving forward. Minnesota’s home opener is Saturday against Miami.

Either Kyle Anderson or Nickeil Alexander-Walker is likely to start in McDaniels’ place against the Raptors.

Related Articles

Minnesota Timberwolves |


Timberwolves, Jaden McDaniels agree to long-term extension

Minnesota Timberwolves |


Timberwolves firmly believe in Nickeil Alexander-Walker. He does, too

Minnesota Timberwolves |


‘It’s light, it’s fun, it’s stress-less’: Timberwolves coaching staff has formed a ‘super rare’ bond

Minnesota Timberwolves |


Healthy again, Timberwolves’ Jordan McLaughlin looks like the player of old

Minnesota Timberwolves |


Timberwolves’ preseason victory provides young guys a chance to show their stuff

Biden won’t appear on New Hampshire primary ballot

posted in: Politics | 0

President Joe Biden’s name will not appear on the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary ballot, as the state moves forward with an unsanctioned nominating contest in 2024.

In a letter to New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Ray Buckley on Tuesday, Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote that “while the president wishes to participate in the Primary,” he is “obligated” to comply with the Democratic National Committee’s presidential nominating calendar. He will “refrain from submitting a Declaration of Candidacy” ahead of Friday’s filing deadline, she wrote, though he will appear on the general election ballot in November 2024.

Withholding Biden’s name from the New Hampshire ballot caps a yearlong effort by the DNC to reorder the 2024 early state lineup, in which Iowa and New Hampshire lost their influential perches atop the calendar. New Hampshire, however, is moving forward with its first-in-the-nation primary, potentially triggering more sanctions against the state from party leaders.

Top Democrats in New Hampshire are expected to lead a write-in effort on behalf of Biden.

Buckley, in a statement posted to X, said Biden “will win the NH FITN Primary in January, win renomination in Chicago and will be re-elected next November.”

Even as Biden’s name won’t appear on the ballot, another Democrat may. Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) is expected to launch his presidential campaign on Friday morning in Concord, N.H. If he gains any traction, that could, at a minimum, result in an embarrassment for Biden there.

Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.

Justin Fox: How we got COVID’s risk right but the response wrong

posted in: Politics | 0

Early in March 2020, I decided to write about the risks posed by COVID-19. I have no background in epidemiology or even health journalism, but I can multiply, divide and make charts and was frustrated with the lack of quantification in most reporting and public-health messaging on what was soon to be declared a pandemic.

In the resulting column I took what seemed to be the most authoritative estimate of COVID’s per-infection fatality rate, 1%, and noted that this was about 10 times the 0.1% fatality rate of seasonal influenza, then conservatively multiplied a CDC estimate of 61,099 influenza-associated deaths in the U.S. in the pretty bad flu season of 2017-2018 by five and 10 to get a range of “300,000 to 600,000 deaths.”

Over the 12 months that followed, about 550,000 Americans died of COVID according to according to the CDC’s provisional estimates and 490,000 according to its tallies of the “underlying cause of death” listed on death certificates. Both are almost certainly undercounts, because in the early days the lack of testing meant many COVID-caused deaths were attributed to other maladies. My guesstimate was also more lucky than good in that actual seasonal flu fatality rates may be closer to 0.04%, and the 2017-2018 influenza toll has since been revised downward to 52,000. Still, it was in the ballpark.

I was reminded of all this while reading a passage in a new book on the history of the pandemic, “The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.”

In March 2020, the authors write, Stanford University health policy professor Jay Bhattacharya “coauthored an article for the Wall Street Journal questioning the validity of the scary 2 to 4 percent fatality rate that the early models like Neil Ferguson’s were estimating — and that were causing governments to panic. He believed (correctly, as it turns out), that the true fatality rate was much lower.”

Well, my 1% fatality rate estimate came from a Feb. 10 paper out of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, then led by none other than Neil Ferguson. The March 24, 2020, Wall Street Journal op-ed by Bhattacharya and Eran Bendavid appropriately took aim at the 2% to 4% fatality rates that the World Health Organization was calculating using confirmed cases as the denominator, but ignored Ferguson’s estimate and went on to propose that the actual fatality rate might be as low as 0.01%, “one-tenth of the flu mortality rate,” and that in the U.S. COVID might be “a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic.”

Studies based on antibody testing later found that, in the early days, among hard-hit, immunologically-naive populations with age distributions like those of East Asia, Europe and North America, COVID killed close to 1% of those infected. Fatality rates seemed to be lower where incidence of the disease was lower (although measurement was less reliable there too), and they have certainly declined over time, especially since vaccines were introduced. But the very early estimate by Ferguson and team, described as “approximately 1%” in the summary of their paper but either 0.9% or 0.8% (depending on assumptions about how long people with COVID kept testing positive for it) in the text, appears to have been quite accurate, and certainly much closer to the mark than Bhattacharya and Bendavid’s spitballing.

It was also not an outlier in early 2020. “The data so far suggest that the virus has a case fatality risk around 1%,” well-informed amateur epidemiologist Bill Gates wrote on the New England Journal of Medicine’s website on Feb. 28. On the same day and in the same place, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci and the heads of the National Institutes of Health and the CDC wrote that the “case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%,” and on March 11 Fauci testified before Congress that it was “somewhere around 1%.” A study published March 30 in Lancet Infectious Diseases, again co-authored by Ferguson, put it at 0.66% overall, albeit much higher for those 60 and older and much lower for those under 50, with the fatality rate for children under 10 estimated at less than 0.002%.

So it wasn’t a faulty expert consensus on the risks posed by COVID that drove the reaction to it. The expert consensus turns out to have been eerily on-target.

But as “The Big Fail” makes maddeningly clear — and no, I didn’t stumble over any other mischaracterizations in it like the one described above — the U.S. did an awful job of balancing COVID’s risks with the costs of fighting the disease. (I should disclose that the authors, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean, are former colleagues of mine and current friendly acquaintances, although we’ll have to see if the latter holds up after they read this column. Something I wrote comparing COVID mortality in California and Florida is cited approvingly in the book.)

The “lockdowns” at the outset of the pandemic — which in the U.S. were mostly not literal lockdowns but did involve strongly urging people to stay home — seem to have saved lives when implemented early enough. It is also undeniable that staying away from other people is an effective way to avoid catching or spreading COVID.

But public policies aimed at encouraging and even requiring such behavior over extended periods were extremely costly and disruptive, and appear to have had at best a modest impact on COVID mortality.

The biggest mismatch between risks and costs in the U.S. involved schooling, as many urban districts did not offer in-person classes for much or all of the 2020-21 school year, with dire consequences for student performance.

How much of a role did misrepresentations of COVID’s mortality rate play in this faulty decision-making? It can’t have helped that the WHO and other data compilers continued throughout the pandemic to report fatality rates based on confirmed case numbers, which the news media usually passed on without adding context. But I also think that a disease with a mortality rate of a bit under 1% is just really hard for people, myself included, to get their heads around. It’s in an uncomfortable middle ground between seasonal viruses that we’ve all grown accustomed to living with (as now seems to be happening with COVID) and high-fatality-rate ones such as Ebola and the original SARS virus that no one would encourage allowing to spread. The conservative meme that “COVID is 99% survivable” — as if that made it a mere trifle — was one indication of this confusion, but Fauci’s waffling over the course of summer 2020 on whether schools should reopen probably was too.

It didn’t help that some of those clamoring loudest for school reopening, such as President Donald Trump, so clearly underestimated COVID’s risks. An underappreciated reason why the October 2020 ” Great Barrington Declaration” calling for an end to lockdowns generated such an allergic reaction in public health circles is that two of its three authors, Bhattacharya and University of Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta — who in May 2020 argued that COVID “has largely come and is on its way out” in the U.K., with a fatality rate between 0.1% and 0.01% — had been so spectacularly wrong in their early risk assessments. These were not people who had earned a lot of credibility on COVID.

It seems telling — or at least ironic — that Sweden, where public health officials greatly overestimated how quickly COVID was spreading early on and thus underestimated its fatality rate, ended up with one of the most successful and sustainable COVID management efforts among Western countries.

Sweden’s approach was never as laissez-faire as sometimes portrayed — high schools and universities were closed early in the pandemic and large gatherings banned — and the initial increase in deaths there was even sharper than in the U.S., but over time the country’s light-touch policies were accompanied by excess mortality only moderately higher than in neighboring Denmark and Norway and much lower than in the U.S. and the rest of Europe. Getting the risks right may not have been essential to getting the response right.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. A former editorial director of Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Giants hiring former Red Sox catcher as new manager, but not Jason Varitek

posted in: News | 0

The San Francisco Giants are filling their managerial vacancy by replacing one former Red Sox player with another.

After firing Gabe Kapler with three games left in the regular season, Bob Melvin will leave San Diego for San Francisco. The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly broke the news on Tuesday afternoon, two days after the outlet reported the Padres had granted the Giants permission to interview Melvin, who had one year remaining on his contract.

Melvin, who turns 62 this week, only managed in San Diego for two seasons, but his departure isn’t exactly a surprise. Increasing tensions between him and general manager A.J. Preller made headlines throughout the 2023 season; that the Padres were willing to let a National League West rival interview and hire their manager indicates a manager-GM relationship eroded to the point of no return. Preller will now search for his seventh Padres manager in nine years.

It’s also a homecoming for the three-time Manager of the Year, who grew up in the Bay Area and managed the Oakland A’s from 2011-21. In 20 seasons as a Major League manager, Melvin has a 1,517-1,425 record, with eight trips to the postseason.

Melvin, who caught for the 1993 Red Sox during his 11-year playing career, wasn’t the only former Red Sox catcher interviewed for the Giants gig. The year Melvin played in Boston, the Minnesota Twins drafted a star catcher who opted to finish college and re-enter the draft in 1994. The Seattle Mariners made an identical selection in 1994, and in 1997, traded a young Jason Varitek to Boston.

Varitek has been on the managerial track for most of the last decade, with the Mariners interviewing him in 2015. The longtime Red Sox captain is a year into a three-year contract extension as a member of the coaching staff, but the club granted the Giants permission to speak with him, which they did by phone last Friday.

“He will manage in the big leagues,” Alex Cora told reporters in February 2021, after Varitek became a full-time member of the coaching staff. “I think, with time, somebody’s going to give him a chance and he’s going to kill it, he’s going to be great.”