Bad news for sports fans everywhere.
Major League Baseball has been in the process of trying to plot a return to get their 2020 season going, but Dr. Anthony Fauci delivered some very bad news for everyone hoping for team sports to return.
Fauci, the infectious disease expert who’s a part of the White House’s coronavirus task force, stated that without widespread testing that garner quick results, sports might be put on the sidelines for the remainder of 2020.
“Safety, for the players and for the fans, trumps everything,” Fauci told the New York Times. “If you can’t guarantee safety, then unfortunately you’re going to have to bite the bullet and say, ‘We may have to go without this sport for this season.’”
The 79-year-old said he would only feel comfortable returning to stadiums when the level of infection is lower than it is now.
“What we need to do is get it, as a country and as individual locations, under control,” Fauci said. “That sometimes takes longer than you would like, and if we let our desire to prematurely get back to normal, we can only get ourselves right back in the same hole we were in a few weeks ago.
“We’ve got to make sure that when we try to get back to normal, including being able to play baseball in the summer and football in the fall and basketball in the winter, that when we do come back to some form of normality, we do it gradually and carefully. And when cases do start to rebound — which they will, no doubt — that we have the capability of identifying, isolating and contact tracing.”
It was just on Tuesday when the United States topped the 1 million-confirmed case threshold.
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“I would love to be able to have all sports back,” Fauci told the Times. “But as a health official and a physician and a scientist, I have to say, right now, when you look at the country, we’re not ready for that yet.”