Since the NCAA tourney was cancelled in March every college basketball fan is dying to know when we will next get to see our favorite teams/players back on the court. The bad news is that we still do not know for sure but the good news is that there are some very smart people who are working hard to give us some much-needed guidance. Last week the NCAA’s D-1 Council voted to lift a moratorium on athletic activities which will allow schools to host voluntary workouts/training sessions. Earlier today the NCAA released a plan for bringing student-athletes back to campus called “The Resocialization of Collegiate Sport: Action Plan Considerations”: www.ncaa.org/sport-science-institute/resocialization-collegiate-sport-action-plan-considerations. The document was developed with the help of the NCAA COVID-19 Advisory Panel, which is comprised of NCAA Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brian Hainline, 7 leading medical/public health/epidemiology experts, and 4 college athlete liaisons. Earlier today HoopsHD’s Jon Teitel got to chat with 1 of those experts (Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security) about his work on the panel and the challenges involved in getting college athletics back on track.
What do you do as a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security? I am an infectious disease doctor who publishes on/researches many topics related to pandemics and emerging infectious diseases, while also spending 50% of my time seeing patients.
In March the NCAA established a coronavirus advisory panel of leading medical experts and NCAA schools to guide its response to the outbreak of the pandemic: how did you get picked? The panel was looking for people with expertise who were working on the COVID response. After the NCAA reached out to Johns Hopkins the school connected them to me.
How do you balance the different factors of individual safety/public safety/college athletics/etc.? This virus is going to be with us until there is a vaccine. We need to think about how to move forward despite the risk involved with every activity while reducing the harm to individuals and not creating a false alternative of no activities being performed at all. The balance involves a lot of shades of grey: there is no black or white. We can minimize the risk but it will never be zero.
How do considerations change as the rates of infection stabilize/decline/get reduced to near-zero after a vaccine is created? The guidance is specifically about COVID so once there is no longer a threat the guidance will no longer be applicable. We just want to minimize the impact of the virus via our recommendations.
Does social distancing only apply to fans and athletes in non-contact sports as opposed to something like college basketball players who often spend 40 minutes/game within 6’ of their opponent? Obviously some sports are not conducive to social distancing but we can modify the basketball locker room/bench. We are giving overarching principles that each school can implement individually but you can keep people 6’ apart in the locker room or use more than 1 locker room and also keep the common-touch areas cleaned as much as possible.
How much testing needs to be in place, and who is supposed to pay for all of it? There is no right or wrong answer but we have heard about German soccer leagues testing twice/week. There is no proscribed frequency of testing but it will likely be once/week and paid for by the schools themselves.
Since travel to sporting events involves physical distancing challenges, do you think that we need any changes made in connection with opponents/locations/travel? Travel is something we will have to address in future phases of the resumption of sports. The NCAA website talks about different kinds of bubbles of people, which might affect how travel occurs and who travels. It is challenging for the inner-bubble people (who include the athlete and those in close proximity to the athlete) because of the risk of exposure entailed by travel and travel might be constrained by “hot spots” at the state/local level that could even require quarantine. Even just having athletes return to campus requires following some general principles regarding travel.
How do we address the concerns from the recent NCAA survey of student-athletes that a majority of participants reported experiencing high rates of mental distress since the outset of the pandemic? This pandemic has touched everybody so we need to ensure that it does not cause undue mental distress. We need to make sure that student-athletes are coping with their new normal and the risk involved with playing sports. There is a package of health concerns that we have to address.
Do you think that the college basketball season will start on time this fall, and do you think there will be an NCAA tournament with fans next March? I think there will be games and the goal is to have March Madness…but mass gatherings will be governed by the state/county and what is going on there as well as vaccine development. In the absence of a vaccine I think that a large crowd is concerning so it will be very challenging not just for sports but for concerts/political gatherings.