For Now At Least, Alameda County's Halt on Reopening Won't Stop Athletics Going Ahead
Alameda County’s Office of Emergency Services said this week that it would be delaying the planned reopening timeline on much of the county’s entertainment business, but to this point at least, the Oakland Athletics aren’t impacted.
The Alameda OES looked at Bay Area increases in COVID-19 cases and hospitalization rates and decided it was time for a temporary pause in the reopening experiment – keeping hair salons, barbershops, pools and indoor dining from resuming their natural functions.
However, the A’s are not impacted and at this point have been cleared to start workouts Saturday at the Coliseum. Other Major League Baseball teams will start up Friday, but the A’s are opting to give it another day to make sure things are in place for the start of baseball in an age of COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Alameda County has seen more than 700 addition COVID-19 cases crop up in the last seven days through Tuesday.
The Major League Baseball regular season is scheduled to start the weekend of July 23-25, although no specific schedule has been issued.
A’s players actually will start to report on Thursday. Everyone on the roster will have to be tested for COVID-19 before taking the field. A’s staff members, most of whom had been working from home until the last week or so, began testing on Tuesday, and every player on the 60-man roster is expected to be tested.
When the workouts do start, the workout groups will be divided; not all of the players will be working out at the same time.0
According to the Mercury News, the tests will be shipped to the Performance Enhancing Drug testing facility in Utah in order to keep Alameda County testing facilities from being overwhelmed.
As of Wednesday morning, the latest count in the two counties that account for most of the A’s fan base, Alameda and Contra Costa, included 207 deaths and 8,737 total coronavirus cases since the pandemic struck; 133 of the deaths and 5,766 of the cases have been in Alameda County, where Oakland is located and where more COVID-19 deaths have occurred than in any other Bay Area county.
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
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