Raptors outbreak should serve as warning for Jays

One of the weird habits I have developed in this pandemic is a regular checking of COVID-19 statistics in Florida.

In the summer, I was doing it as the National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer were setting up plans to complete their 2020 seasons in that state, even as virus case numbers there were exploding.

Those sports bubbles ended up being strict enough that the situation in Florida proper didn't affect them, but I still peek at the state's numbers now and then, in part because it's the adopted home of the Toronto-tampa Raptors this season, and is the temporary home of the Toronto Blue Jays for at least the next few months.

On Monday, Florida reported around 1,800 new cases of COVID -19 that had been detected in the previous 24 hours. This was a surprisingly low number by Florida's standards. At around 85 new cases per million residents, it wasn't dramatically higher than the new-case rate in Ontario, which has been around 75 per million for a number of days despite much tighter restrictions than in Florida. Did the combination of vaccinations and herd immunity mean that Florida had finally started to beat back the virus after multiple waves that were among the highest in North America?

On Tuesday came further evidence: Nope. Florida reported just more than 7,000 new cases on the day, for a rate of 333 per million. As Jack Armstrong would say, helloooo. On Wednesday it was 5,555 new cases, or 264 per million.

Over the past month, the state has been over 5,000 daily cases 27 times, and over 6,000 cases a total of 18 times. Is this simply a product of greater testing resources? It is not. Florida's test positivity rate has been above six per cent for all but seven days in the past month, and never below five per cent, numbers that would cause Canadian public health officials to faint.

Given that context, the only surprise about the COVID outbreak that caused the postponement of two Raptors games and forced them to play this week without several key players and almost the entire coaching staff is that it didn't happen sooner. Despite the many confusing and conflicting public health messages of the past months, one of the simplest rules is that infections are more likely if the virus is circulating in the community. It is, quite evidently, circulating in Florida at a much higher rate than it is in Toronto, so if the Raptors are going to get past this present outbreak and complete their season without further COVID -related postponements and absences, they're going to have to be extra cautious.

The team has followed the usual pattern of keeping the nature of its outbreak relatively private, although there have been reports citing unnamed sources that improper mask usage among the coaching staff allowed for transmission within the organization. One of the other things that's been learned over this pandemic is that it doesn't take much for an outbreak to occur in a team setting, which is an ever-changing tree of close contacts. One infected but asymptomatic individual comes in and suddenly there are a host of positive tests and quarantine requirements.

The Blue Jays should be paying attention to the situation with the Raptors, as it's a preview of what could happen to them if they play loose with the rules. The Jays are likely to be based in Tampa for the entire spring, and given that Florida has been one of the most open states throughout the pandemic, it almost certainly will have considerable community spread of the virus for weeks to come, until its vaccination campaign covers most of the adult population.

(A pause here to note that Florida's vaccination campaign should be the envy of Canada. It has put needles into the arms of so many seniors that the number of new Covid-related deaths has fallen off a cliff, even as the case rates have stayed high. But for the Raptors, Jays or any other professional outfit in the state, that's of little consequence at present. The potential for infection will still be high for some time.)

There's another point here, and it's just one of the many ways in which this pandemic has made so many things that would have been previously unthinkable not even worthy of a second guess. The Raptors and Jays are employees of Canadian companies, but forced to remain in the U.S. because no one wanted to deal with the fallout of “special treatment” had various governments allowed teams to travel in and out of Toronto. The Jays didn't even ask to play in the Rogers Centre, having seen the Raptors have their request shot down.

The optics would have been that much worse had the teams been allowed to travel freely in and out of the city as Ottawa instituted its air travel quarantine policy, where new arrivals must pay about a zillion dollars for a mandatory hotel stay that includes a soggy ham sandwich.

But it remains a weird thing we're doing. The virus is a bigger problem down there: please stay.