Disease expert: Safe return is possible — maybe Sixers schedule

Sixers, NBA still planning to restart season July 30 in Orlando despite Florida’s latest coronavirus spike

This is a big week for the NBA as teams begin to ramp things up in anticipation of resuming the season, which will begin July 30 in Orlando.

On Wednesday, teams will begin mandatory individual workouts. The following week, 22 teams will depart for Orlando and ESPN’s Wide World of Sports complex. The 76ers will depart for Orlando on July 9.

Amid all the health concerns, the NBA is making an effort to finish the season. At this point, nothing is a given.

The NBA is preparing a startup, but due to the uncertainty of COVID-19, nobody knows whether the plan to resume the season will work.

“COVID-19 has humbled us as a society,” Commissioner Adam Silver said in a Friday conference call with reporters.

The first regular-season games, called “seed games,” will begin July 30. Teams will play eight games before the playoffs. The Sixers open Aug. 1 against the Indiana Pacers.

On Friday, the NBA announced that 16 of the 302 players tested postive for COVID-19. Silver did mention that none of the 16 was seriously ill.

With all that as a background, we consulted with Ron Waldman, M.D., the professor of Global Health Milken Institute School of Public Health, George Washington University. Waldman, an infectious disease expert, doesn’t feel 16 positive tests will have a negative impact moving forward.

“I don’t see why it would affect anything,” he said in a phone interview. “They just need to make sure they go in with a zero baseline. You can’t have the virus enter the facility.”

Waldman said the key will be testing.

“They need to test others often,” he said. “I think the protocols I saw were pretty good.”

Silver said Friday “there will be daily testing, at least to start.”

Waldman was then asked a simple question as to whether this plan can work.

“My instant response is maybe,” she said. “Keep in mind if a group of players don’t have the virus, they can’t transmit it.

“So it’s not so much the players, but any outside people who can transmit it.”

That said, Waldman says that it’s likely that things won’t totally go smoothly.

“It’s very possible there could be setbacks along the way,” he said. “There could be bumps in the road, but if they really want to do it, I think it is possible. I am not crazy about being in the middle of Florida now because that presents a risk.”

On Saturday, the Florida Department of Health announced 9,585 new cases of COVID-19, a single-day record.