In a world deflected from its axis through COVID-19, in a year in which many of our family routines and hobbies are now putting us in danger, the long-awaited return of the major leagues designed to mark our first steps fundamentally. path to a new normal.
Unfortunately, reports from Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals baseball groups result that achieving even an abbreviated season gives just a ghost of normality amid a pandemic, a mirage like virtual and cardboard crowds that dot the empty bleachers for spectators, or The sound of the ghost crowd heard on radio shows.
Seventeen of the 33 Marlins players who traveled to Philadelphia for three games opposed to the Phillies on baseball’s first weekend tested positive for COVID-19, which suspended their season for 8 days after only three games. Thirteen members of the Cardinals organization, adding up seven players, tested positive and their season is scheduled to resume on August 7. Meanwhile, MLB owners and league officials are thinking about the inevitable next wave.
Baseball is called a metaphor for life. And in this, our COVID-19 summer classes abound in virus control through Major League Baseball.
While we can’t say for sure what led to such a sudden outbreak in any of the equipment, it is credible that the virus will spread in the confined spaces of the locker room, clubhouse, team bus or charter flight.
What’s true about COVID-19 in baseball is what’s true of COVID-19 on the global foreign: it doesn’t respect borders or barriers or differences in team uniforms or political affiliation.
And we know one more thing: physical estrangement works. Wearing a mask works. And restricting exposure to other people outdoors from your bubble slows the spread of the virus.
But the MLB outbreak has revealed some other fears we want to pay attention to: the delay of verification. Multimillion-dollar sports leagues have access to some of the most productive control functions in this country. But because COVID spreads even when other people are asymptomatic and the verification effects can take days, in the case of the Marlins, players and have kept in touch with the rest of the team, spreading the virus unknowingly while waiting for verification effects.
Baseball’s uplifting narrative makes it clear that it makes no sense to resume our pre-pandemic lifestyles in the face of a viral epidemic that is still under control. We don’t know how some of the Marlins players contracted the virus so early in the new season; However, we know that not taking appropriate measures to curb the spread of the virus puts more people at risk of infection.
More: Another explanation for why to get back in the game: getting AMERICAN charities out of banking
As researchers rush to produce an effective vaccine that prevents COVID-19 infection, for our own lives and the well-being of our beings and communities, we will have to wear cloth masks, practice physical estrangement, wash our hands, avoid giant meetings and restrict the time we spend inside with others. There is so much to do and we will have to locate the collective will to do it together.
At a press conference on the fourth weekend of July 4, Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle spoke to reporters through a mask about the impending return of baseball and other professional sports in the summer of 2020.
“Sport is like the praise of a society that works,” Doolittle said. “And we’re just looking to bring him back, even though we haven’t taken any of the steps to flatten the curve. We want the general public. If you want to watch baseball, please wear a mask, a social distance, keep washing your hands.”
The rate at which the coronavirus spreads among the Marlins shows how smoothly it is transmitted. We do not know about this contagion at our risk, and the resumption of our pre-pandemic way of life without worrying about COVID-19 transmission will continue to lead to more infections, more hospitalizations and more deaths.
Baseball’s backward pass was intended to be a component of a pass backwards to the general: the merit of hard paintings to flatten the curve. Instead, as cases continue to rise across the country and the disorders of March and the first days of the virus go unanswered, no one, not even baseball, is immune to the wonderful challenges.
Unfortunately, in 2020, baseball is not so much a metaphor for life, but a reminder of our inability to take the hard steps to defeat COVID-19.
Dr. Susan R. Bailey is President of the American Medical Association.