Skip to main content

13 positive COVID-19 tests in one Major League Baseball clubhouse During the first week of the MLB season, the coronavirus spread through the Miami Marlins. Players have been quarantined, and their next two games postponed.


Three days into their season and the Miami Marlins have at least 11 players testing positive for the coronavirus. (Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)
Three days into their season and the Miami Marlins have at least 11 players testing positive for the coronavirus. (Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)

Why can’t the Marlins keep playing?

Twelve Marlins players and two coaches have reportedly tested positive. How likely is it that other Marlins have contracted the virus, and haven’t yet tested positive, but will in the coming days?

“Very likely, unfortunately,” says Kathleen Bachynski, an epidemiologist at Muhlenberg College.

“Quite likely,” says Ron Waldman, an epidemiologist at George Washington University.

“Yeah,” says Jared Baeten, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington. “If it was one player, totally different. But clearly, to get to 13, there are not 13 separate introductions [of the virus] into the Marlins organization. There is transmission within the team. And if there is transmission in the team, there's great chance that there is still unrecognized transmission within the team.”

In other words, the three Marlins players who received positive test results Sunday morning spent Saturday with teammates while infectious. The seven players and two coaches whose tests came back positive Monday morning spent Sunday with teammates while infectious. If those teammates contracted the virus this past weekend, however, we won’t know whether they have or haven’t for at least another few days. We probably can’t be sure any of them isn’t infected until sometime next week. Because the virus takes time to incubate.

“You cannot assume that you have identified everybody who is infected,” Binney says.

Would super-frequent testing allow the Marlins to safely continue playing?

No, because even MLB’s expedited testing process comes with a lag time between test and result. “Even if you're doing regular testing,” Binney says, “you have this space, in between when somebody gets infectious and when you get a positive result back, where they can be spreading the virus.” The more frequent the testing, and the quicker the turnaround time, the smaller that space is. But it's impossible to eliminate it entirely.

So, if the Marlins continue to play, and continue to spend time in clubhouses together, and continue to have close contact with one another, they increase the probability that the virus will spread further – including to “taxi squad” players they’ve called up to replace those who’ve tested positive. Then the outbreak grows, and the Marlins struggle to field a team. Manfred said Monday that “a team losing a number of players that rendered it completely non-competitive” was the threshold for shutting that team down.

“You're going to be getting cases coming up over the next few days,” Binney says. “And if you keep playing, then the disease is not going to stop.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This is the first known particle with four of the same kind of quark-The exotic particle could be a unique testing ground for ideas about how quarks interact

In a never-before-seen particle, four quarks of a feather flock together. Physicists think they have detected the first conglomerate of four quarks incorporating more than two of the same kind. This tetraquark contains  four quarks of the charm variety : two charm quarks and their antimatter counterparts, called anticharm quarks, researchers report online at arXiv.org on June 30. Quarks — fundamental building blocks of matter — typically make up three-quark particles, like protons and neutrons, or quark-antiquark pairs, like pions and kaons. Physicists have observed some more exotic  quark quartets  ( SN: 4/11/14 ) and  even quintets  ( SN: 7/14/15 ). But the new four-quark particle, dubbed X(6900), is the first four-quark particle with all of the same type. Since charm quarks and their anticharm counterparts are among the heaviest types of quarks, it is also the first tetraquark to include more than two heavy quarks. “It’s a pretty exciting finding,” says physi...

Google just put a photo of the Pixel 4A on its store 38 .Is the next budget Pixel finally coming soon?

Image: Google Where is Google’s Pixel 4A? Sitting right on the company’s online store, as it turns out. Google seems to have mistakenly published an image of the Pixel 4A on its Canadian store. The text says “Nest Wifi,” but uh... that’s no Nest Wifi. The phone has already leaked extensively over the last few months, but this is a marketing render direct from Google — and it suggests that the 4A might finally be coming sometime in the near future. Note also that the screen has a date of May 12th on it, which is pretty solid confirmation that Google did originally plan to launch the 4A during its annual developers conference before it was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nest Wifi, you say? I don’t think so. RELATED The 4A seen in the photo has a matte black finish with a light blue power button and the large camera cutout we’ve seen in prior leaks; there’s just one camera in there, though. Thankfully the headphone jack is still up there at the top. The phone is believed to have...

Puspha Allu Arjun movie Full hd

HELLO Pushpa: The Rise – Part 1 is a 2021 Indian Telugu-language action drama film[4] written and directed by Sukumar. Produced by Mythri Movie Makers in association with Muttamsetty Media, the film stars Allu Arjun as the titular character alongside Rashmika Mandanna and Fahadh Faasil (in his Telugu debut). The first of two cinematic parts, the plot is based on the red sanders smuggling in the Seshachalam Hills of the Rayalaseema region of Andhra Pradesh. Pushpa: The Rise – Part 1 https://dlslink.net/f242f739