As NFL Teams Prepare Returns, Dr. Fauci Says 'Football May Not Happen This Year'
While the Jacksonville Jaguars and all the other NFL clubs are preparing for at least a semblance of a normal football season, Dr. Anthony Fauci says football will look very different this fall—if it happens at all.
Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases and advisor with the White House Coronavirus Task Force, told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta that any football this fall would require near isolation due to the continued spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19.
“Unless players are essentially in a bubble – insulated from the community and they are tested nearly every day – it would be very hard to see how football is able to be played this fall,” Fauci told Gupta.
“If there is a second wave,” he continued, “which is certainly a possibility and which would be complicated by the predictable flu season, football may not happen this year.”
The NBA has rolled out plans to finish a shortened tournament like season in Orlando and Walt Disney World’s Wide World of Sports complex. There, players and teams can be kept in the same place and separate from the outside world. The complex, it should be noted, also has several football fields where Pro Bowl practices have been held in the past.
Gupta revealed on Twitter that the conversation arose as he and Fauci are both big sports fans and were wondering what it would take to see football and baseball safely return.
On Tuesday in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Fauci said that the United States is still in the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. A second wave, he’s long-held, would hit during the flu-ridden fall and winter seasons.
"People keep talking about a second wave. We’re still in a first wave."
States, like Florida, have seen record days of cases this week and as of Thursday, had seen two days in a row of a record number of new cases as testing increased. In Duval County, there have been 82 new cases in the past 24 hours according to research from John Hopkins University, and 59 deaths since the pandemic began.
John Hopkins Infographic for Duval County as of June 18, 2020
As hospitalization and death numbers showed a downwards trend, the NFL league office allowed team facilities to reopen first to office staff then coaches. Players, to this point, have still not be allowed back in to the building.
If the NFL is able to move forward with games albeit in a style that Dr. Fauci presented, then players would likely be quarantined for much of the seasons together. Coaches, staff, medical personnel, family and media would most likely be a part of that as well.
Gupta, a Professor of Neurosurgery at Emory University at CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent, also proposed that if football does happen, it will be with modifications such as, “possible modified face masks embedded in players helmets, single-use hydration containers and physical distancing + masks on the sidelines.”
Back at the end of May as the Jaguars prepared to welcome coaches back and make plans for a players eventual return, Jacksonville Head Coach Doug Marrone said making sure all safety precautions were in place so players could just focus on the games would be key.
“When they tell us that it’s safe and competitive equality comes into place, we’ll be ready to go. We look forward to it, but we know there’s a lot of work and a lot of preparation for that as we go forward. I think that the only thing that I thought about was that if we do start bringing the coaches back, then we can get into a system of what our protocol is, our procedures of how are we meeting as a staff because of social distancing, how we move around the building, how everything’s going to go.
“I’d like people, the head of departments, the people that are working in the building to have all that in place. Having done it that way we can all help the players adapt to it. One of the things that I’ve been doing in our virtual team meetings is I’ve explained to the players. I’ve given them all the information that I have, but to tell them, ‘Hey, listen, let’s make sure we understand that it’s going to be different whenever we come back.’ My goal is to keep informing the players of the procedures and what we’re trying to get done so that when they do come back, their focus isn’t going to be on how we’re eating, how is the locker room, all the things that we have to do to keep each other safe. Their focus can be on what we have to do to win football games.”
While this may seem like an overreaction and the return of sports can provide much-needed normalcy, Dr. Fauci told CBS News back in March as quarantine plans began, that he was ok with that label.
“The way you get ahead of it is that, as I try to explain to people, that I want people to assume that ... we are overreacting because if it looks like you're overreacting, you're probably doing the right thing."
