Leading OFF
Experts fear leagues will use up COVID-19 testing resources
In their quest to return to play amid a global pandemic, professional sports leagues have built their safety protocols upon a common foundation: testing.
MLB and MLS are testing all of their players and key staff members for COVID-19 multiple times a week. The NBA’s bubble near Orlando, Florida, features daily tests. The NFL has yet to finalize its protocol for the fall – but if it goes ahead with the 2020 season, frequent testing will surely be a priority.
One month ago, sports’ use of those COVID-19 tests – and the lab capacity needed to process them – was thought to be incidental. But now, the United States is seeing more than 50,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day. Major commercial labs are struggling to keep up with the high demand, causing delays in turnaround times. And experts wonder if the return of sports could burden an increasingly fragile testing infrastructure.
“That’s been a big concern for me, as I’ve been seeing different leagues and their plans for reopening,” said Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at New York University and Bellevue Hospital.
“We’re testing a lot (in New York), but other parts of the country don’t have that same capacity. And if you have every single player on a team wanting to be tested – even if it’s once a week or twice a week – that’s just a huge strain on the system.”
In addition to tens of thousands of tests a week that will likely be needed for the safe return of sports, there’s the lab capacity needed to process them.
As large commercial labs deal with slowdowns, leagues could be forced to either wait several days for test results like members of the public – rendering the results essentially useless as athletes continue to compete – or get results back earlier, with a perception that they are cutting in line.
Leagues say they have taken steps to ensure their operations don’t impact testing and lab infrastructure, both regionally and nationwide. And some experts said they believe the tests being used by the NBA, MLB and MLS – which USA TODAY Sports estimated at 19,000 a week – amount to little more than a drop in the metaphorical bucket for a nation that has most recently been processing nearly 640,000 tests a day.
Others said it’s hard to know exactly what kind of burden sports might have on the testing infrastructure, a complicated web of public and private labs and supply chains that often overlap. They argue that even a slight strain on the system could prove consequential and that the notion of sports leagues using up scarce resources veers into matters of ethics and optics.
“You don’t want to be in the mansion on the hill, while all the peasants down there are starving,” said Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist and incoming professor at Oxford College of Emory University. “The peasants’ situation isn’t your fault, (but) you still don’t want to be sitting in that house on that hill when you could help.”
‘Not one versus the other’
Several professional sports leagues have already returned to play or are scheduled to return this month, including MLB, MLS, NASCAR, the WNBA, the PGA Tour and the National Women’s Soccer League.
But perhaps no league has found itself at the center of the country’s COVID-19 response like the NBA.
It was the first pro league to suspend play, halting a game on March 11 when Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19. Then it faced brief backlash because its teams had access to testing while some in the general population struggled to get tested.
Two months later, the pandemic had not completely subsided but there were promising signs. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths related to COVID-19 had plateaued or trended downward. Once-scarce tests had become plentiful. Hot spots such as New York City were largely under control. So the NBA began developing a plan to resume play at the Disney sports complex in Florida.
But as states began relaxing stay-at-home orders, those promising trends flipped.
Now, with games scheduled to begin July 30, the timing and location couldn’t be much worse. On July 12, Florida reported 15,283 new cases, the most reported in a single day for any state. It reported 12,343 new cases July 13.
“It only took us two or three weeks to get back into this bad situation,” said Jill Roberts, an infectious disease expert and associate professor at the University of South Florida.
The spike in cases – first in a handful of Southern states, and now across much of the U.S. – has led to a sharp increase in the demand for testing. And several of the nation’s large commercial labs are now facing backlogs.
Quest Diagnostics, which has facilitated some of the NBA’s testing, said last week that everyone outside of its high-priority group – namely hospital patients and symptomatic health care workers – would now have to wait four to six days for their results. LabCorp, another major commercial lab, said that it was experiencing similar issues.
BioReference Laboratories, which has partnered with MLS and NBA to process tests for their bubble sites in Florida, said in a statement it was processing tests within 72 hours with an estimated capacity of 70,000 tests a day.
“We have enough capacity right now to test the people we’ve made our commitments to,” Jon Cohen, the company’s executive chairman, told USA TODAY Sports last week. “If you have a relationship with BioReference, and we have made a commitment to you, we’re going to deliver on that commitment.”
Cohen said this commitment extends to turn around times. However, he also acknowledged that there have been days in which his labs have not been able to process all the tests they received due to myriad factors, including excessive demand, supply chain issues and equipment malfunctions.
And that leads to a situation in which some batches of tests are processed more quickly than others.
“I have hospitals that need a certain turnaround time because they want to do some elective procedures,” he explained. “I know we have urgent cares where people are suffering, that need certain turnaround times. I have sports franchises that need certain