The coronavirus rages in the United States, halting progress made by multiple states and causing many to regress from opening back up as they’ve done in the past few days.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver spoke during an appearance on Time 100 Talks about the status of the NBA”s restart.
Never full steam ahead no matter what,
One thing we are learning about this virus is much [is] unpredictable, and we and our players together with their union look at the data on a daily basis. If there were something to change that was outside of the scope of what we are playing for, certainly we would revisit our plans.
Strong words came from Silver in this regard, with an openness and honesty that has pervaded many of his discussions in recent months both about the league’s restart and the players that make up the organization.
Talking heads across the spectrum of sports have grown increasingly wary of the NBA’s “bubble plans” in Orlando, Florida as the state has seen a large increase in COVID-19 cases in the last week. Multiple players from NBA teams, along with the Denver Nuggets closing their facilities, have made this discussion even more prominent a week before players are slated to report to Disney’s campus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8XXsdi1X5M
Silver continued his response to TIME and spoke on the benchmarks the NBA has put out for itself.
We are testing daily. We haven’t put a precise number on it, but if we were to see a large number of cases and see spread in our community, that would of course be a cause to stop as well.
This issue doesn’t appear to be going anywhere as high profile players have now been reported to have contracted the disease. 16 players tested positive for the virus on June 26th out of a league sample of 302, while multiple other NBA teams have reported cases as well. DeAndre Jordan and Spencer Dinwiddie, of the Brooklyn Nets, stated they tested positive on Monday, matching reports that three New Orleans Pelicans players also tested positive.
Silver finished his thoughts by speaking strongly on the efforts put forth by the league.
I’m pretty confident, largely because we are playing on a campus that is confined in that the only way to gain access to that campus is to be part of our protocol where there is regular testing,
And if someone were to leave our campus, they would need to test and quarantine in order to return to play. So at least in terms of the model, we are protected from the rate of cases in the broader community.
