01-09-2021, 05:21 PM
(01-09-2021, 03:31 PM)KillerLeft Wrote: Yeah, that's what I'm struggling with, too. Maybe @"DrMav" can help us make sense of this?
I don’t know that there’s much that makes sense of how sports leagues are conducting their seasons from a medical sense.
The CDC still recommends 14 day quarantines for individuals who have close contact with someone COVID positive, and they way they define close contact is any of the following:
- Being within 6 feet for 15 minutes or more
- Providing care at home to someone infected
- Having direct physical contact with someone infected
- Sharing eating/drinking utensils
- They sneezed, coughed, or got respiratory droplets on you
The 2 bolded above seems really easy for an NBA team or their competitor to fall victim to, and the italicized seems like it could happen as guys are huffing and puffing during a game though I think could be more up to interpretation. For example at my hospital if you are on supplemental oxygen, there is a certain threshold of delivered oxygen that if you are above would be considered “aerosol generating” due to the higher flow, and thus different PPE is used due to the thought that it is a potentially higher infectious opportunity. I think you could consider an NBA player heavily breathing to be more likely contagious as their respiratory particles will travel further due to higher force of breathing.
Ultimately to me, the way the NBA, NFL, MLB, and soon to be NHL are doing things is about putting on enough of an appearance that they are doing things as safe as possible, while not following recommendations closely enough that playing their season would be completely impossible.