Q: Major League Baseball tried to launch their shortened season and soon after had to cancel one of their games because so many of the Miami Marlin players were infected with the virus –which got me thinking, how are regular businesses and schools supposed to open safely if a gigantic and wealthy sports league franchise like the MLB, who has tons of money to access testing, is having a hard time doing business?
A: You’re right, if we look at the MLB franchise (which is valued well over 10 billion) and think of them as an employer who is making decisions about bringing their workforce back to work, we begin to see that the challenge before us is bigger than many recognize.
We hear all employers pay lip service to how their “people” -their human resources or human capital- are their most valuable asset. But in the case of the MLB, this is actually true. Each player is, figuratively speaking, an expensive, one-of-a-kind piece of equipment. The MLB will pay what it takes to protect these players, testing them every other day, because they actually are the league’s most valued asset. By the end of the season, according to the Chicago Tribune “MLB officials expect to have conducted some 275,000 saliva tests, (showing whether a live virus is present) on their athletes and employees.”
They even have their own laboratory to speedily process testing results. Imagine having that type of resources at your fingertips –something our school systems and small businesses would only dream of. Yet, to answer your question, that type of point-of-care nasal swab testing with quick turnaround results is exactly what will be needed across the country for schools and businesses to open up safely.
How close are we? Not very.
Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College of Emory University, said in the Chicago Tribune that MLB is following similar guidelines as the professional soccer league in Germany but “The problem is we are not Germany. We are not South Korea. We are not New Zealand. We have a poorer response to the virus and more cases. … “
He’s right, we are not Germany -who has less than one case per 100k people vs. the US with 19 cases per- (and FL with 48 cases per). We have “more cases” in the US by orders of magnitude, which is hard to grasp and compare.
To say “we have a poorer response to the virus” just doesn’t come close to our situation. We have a “spectacularly poorer” response and we have a long way to go.
©Copyright Eva Del Rio Send questions to Eva@evadelrio.com
