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The leagues are creating bubbles and drafting protection protocols, but as long as the coronavirus continues to jump across the country, their seasons will be at risk.
By Matthew Futterman
He doesn’t intend to take place that way.
The return of primary sports to the United States after coronavirus ruptures coincided with flat curves and reduced considerations of infection and mortality rates and hospitalizations.
Instead, the instances soar and the fears grow. Fear is the innermost thing in Florida, the home of two Major League Baseball groups and the privileged location of the “bubbles” of N.B.A., Major League Soccer and W.N.B.A., and in Texas, where two M.L.B. They’re located. groups and the planned site of at least 60 baseball games in the coming months.
The leagues say their back-to-game protocols will minimize the threat of infection to athletes and team staff. But infectious disease experts say that even though the plans and crafting manuals are exhaustive, the N.B.A. and M.L.B. the guides have 113 pages: they offer many tips on how to eat, exercise and wash, some infections are inevitable and the leagues do not have a transparent answer about how much is too much.
According to experts, the challenge for those who still make plans to return is that many things are beyond any league, team or administration, all of which is at the mercy of emerging national infection rates, and those in their hometown.
“I’m less positive about the game’s return over time,” said Melissa Nolan, an epidemiologist at the University of South Carolina. “It’s hard to justify resuming the game when we’re still suffering to open up fundamental services.”
In March, he only took a positive check to close the N.B.A. What will he take now? And will the constant fall of individual players who decide to play soon become a torrent?
If the last 10 days are an indication, everything is about to get complicated. M.L.B. groups will arrive in the country in the market until the end of July, and players will already have a pass. Ryan Zimmerman of the Washington Nationals said Monday he would retire from the season. Teammate Joe Ross, former teammate Ian Desmond, now with Colorado, and Mike Leake of the Arizona Diamondbacks also said they would not play.
The N.B.A. announced over the weekend that 16 of their players had tested positive for their first sample circular, and several stars have already announced that they will remain at home when the league restarts at the end of July. M.L.S., who has had 24 positive tests, can resume his season next week without his most valuable player in the title.
At last week’s PGA Tour Traveler Championship, several players withdrew after they or their caddies tested positive for coronavirus. And while the one-month National Women’s Football League tournament is underway in Utah, it started without a full team, Orlando Pride, which had to retire after six players and four team staff members tested positive for their preparations.
Several European football leagues have restarted their seasons, including those in Italy and Spain, devastated by the disease just a few months ago. The difference between Europe, and in specific Germany, where the Bundesliga has been back in action for more than a month, and the United States is that those countries have been much more effective at reducing infection rates.
“People need to know why we couldn’t get back in the game sooner,” said Zachary Binney, a game epilogist at Emory University in Atlanta. “That’s because we don’t have the virus under control.”
Updated July 31, 2020
This is what it is when the global game slowly comes back to life:
The result is a scenario that turns out to be more dubious every day. “We’re getting the game back not without crossing hands and getting excited about the concept that everything will be fine,” said Neel Gandhi, Binney’s colleague at Emory School of Public Health. “But last week it showed that we are still very vulnerable. Possibly we’d be worse than we were a month or two ago.”
League officials stated that they knew that not all of their players would be comfortable with their plans to re-compete. Some athletes have expressed considerations about their own fitness or that of a member of the family circle. Others wonder what the threat posed by the virus to its long-term fitness.
The N.F.L. and its players’ union are continuing to negotiate all of these issues, and those discussions have included not only opt-out provisions but also — notably — a shutdown threshold, though nothing has been finalized. Unlike the N.B.A. and other leagues that are trying to complete or resume seasons interrupted by the pandemic, the N.F.L. still has some time.
Football players do not show up to the education camp until the end of July of a general year; Until then, there will be some initial classes of what other leagues have gone through, adding those that have restarted or planned to do so in limited environments, so-called “bubbles,” and those that, like baseball, won’t.
M.L.S.’s first internal criticism The bubbles have been positive. Teams began arriving in Orlando, Florida, last week. The San Jose earthquakes were the first because they had not acted as a complete team in the team’s national market.
San Jose defender Tommy Thompson said at a video convention friday that players largely remain in their rooms when they were off the field. There, he says, they read, watch videos or play video games, and then gather to team up within the Disney compound that the league took next month. For now, players say, everyone is aware of the possible consequences of venturing outdoors in the regulated spaces beneath the league.
“I’m sorry for what I can be,” said Chris Mueller, an aheadr of Orlando City S.C. “I feel more here than at home.
However, the point at which a buildup of infections in a team or league crosses a red line of coronavirus that has not yet been established is not yet clear.
Binney said that if three or four players from a team tested positive, the leagues deserve a sign of epidemic and shut down the team for a while. But how many groups will have to be closed for a league to cancel their season is unclear.
“If you don’t draw a red line, you give an excuse, when there’s a lot of cash at stake, to push it more than it should,” he said.
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