Turner incident raises concerns
Risk-reward debate over team activities becomes front and centre
Sporting venues and games certainly have super-spreader potential, but that risk can be minimized with buy-in from all involved, experts said Wednesday.
The subject moved into the spotlight after Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner tested positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday night. He was isolated after being pulled from Game 6 of the World Series after the seventh inning, but returned to the field — without a mask at times and sometimes without distancing — to celebrate his team’s title.
Major League Baseball said it is investigating and players from the Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays had been tested again Wednesday. The wife of one Rays player tested positive.
“I don’t want to prophesize, but it’s quite likely that a number of members of both teams are going to come down with COVID now because Mr. Turner was interacting with them,” said Kevin Coombs, an infectious disease researcher and professor of medical microbiology at the University of Manitoba.
Both teams headed home from the Dallas area Wednesday, The Associated Press reported, with Turner travelling by private plane.
With many sports ongoing through the fall and others considering a return over the coming months, the risk-reward debate over whether team activities are a good idea is once again being stoked.
“There’s going to be nuances associated with all these different sports, in terms of where they’re played and how they’re played,” said Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto. “And I think we can take creative ways to mitigate risk in those settings. Now I don’t think you can say sports are back and there’s a way to do it all the time. I think we have to think about to what extent can risk be reduced. The other point is, how acceptable is that to the local public health authorities and to the community where the sport is being played, and to the people actually playing the sport? Those are big questions to ask because you really need to have buy-in.”
Bogoch, who helped advise with the set-up of NHL bubbles that were successfully used in Toronto and Edmonton, said there is a risk of a super-spreader event in team sports.
“We’ve seen numerous examples of how this infection can be amplified in sport venues,” he said. “We’ve seen it in professional sports and we’ve seen it in minor sports. We saw it in baseball earlier on in the MLB season and we’ve seen it in junior hockey, where they don’t have as many resources at their disposal.”
Rising case numbers in Canada and elsewhere aren’t helping matters.
“I think that any team sport, any event where a number of people are getting together, it increases the risk,” Coombs said from Winnipeg. “There’s no two ways about it.”