Against mountainous odds, Major League Baseball has managed to sustain its so-called season into a fourth week despite substantial casualties.
Dozens of players have fallen ill and cancellations have been common due to the virus, which has disrupted schedules in both leagues to varying degrees. The St. Louis Cardinals, who lost the entire series with the Pirates this week due to COVID-19 positivity, had been barely able to play once a week as of Saturday.
But what baseball has, and what the NFL has, and the NBA has, and the NHL has, and Major League Soccer has are the tests — oodles and caboodles of tests with quick turnarounds on results. Well that’s wonderful news, except that even in July — four months into the pandemic — people were passing out in their cars while waiting up to 13 hours for tests in Phoenix while the Arizona Diamondbacks and their attendant personnel were getting tested every other day.
Baseball and the other sports might not care about the optics, but what of the ethics?
(For the sake of argument, let’s just posit that ethics are still a thing.)
“I definitely think that there is an ethical dilemma when we’re talking about who gets access to COVID-19 testing and who doesn’t,” the social epidemiologist Dr. Alvin Tran was telling me on the phone from Connecticut the other day. “Given all that’s been happening in terms of what I think is preferential access to COVID-19 testing, it reminds me of a lot of conversations in the medical and public health community when it comes to, ‘OK, what do we do when a celebrity or a high-profile client shows up in a hospital? Do they get preferential treatment?’ If so, that kind of makes a health professional’s judgment cloudy. We technically should not be providing preferential treatment to anyone based on their income status or their level of fame or popularity.
“I think there’s a huge concern here. By allowing these special athletes increased access to COVID-19 testing and expediting the time they can get their results, I do believe that it reinforces what I’d call an already existing system of privilege, one that favors the rich, the powerful, when it comes to them receiving better health care.”
Dr. Tran did post-doctoral work at Harvard and taught at Emory University and the University of Washington before taking his current gig as assistant professor of public health at the University of New Haven. It’s probably not required that you possess his kind of brain to understand where the kind of quick and effective COVID-19 testing available to elite athletes ought to be channeled as the country struggles with its worst public health crises since 1918, but he was still willing to spell it out.
“The people in my mind who should getting this preferential treatment are the people who are working in hospital settings,” he said. “Our doctors, our nurses, who are providing care, day-in and day-out for patients who may be having COVID-19 symptoms or may actually have tested positive for COVID-19. And of course people who have symptoms should be getting tested, as well as people in the higher-risk categories. Those are the people who should be receiving preferential access and results to our tests. Testing companies and centers are overwhelmed right now. Can’t get results fast enough. People in positions of power or who have higher incomes receiving special access compared to other groups in the population, that to me is an unethical situation.”
In one anecdote highlighted recently in the Los Angeles Times, a Florida physician tested a patient for COVID-19, submitted it to a lab, and was still waiting for the results 16 days later. Half an hour away inside the MLS bubble in Orlando, 180 players and staff from four soccer teams were tested as they checked into a hotel. Their results came back within hours.
Both the MLS and the NBA, the other Orlando bubble operation, have already responded to resultant criticism. The NBA planned to set up a mobile testing site in the community, and MLS was working with BioReference to provide antibody testing.
Baseball issued a statement that was the rhetorical equivalent of fouling a pitch off its face:
“By creating its own laboratory and not relying on a commercial laboratory to process most of its samples, MLB has not taken laboratory capacity from the healthcare sector,” said the statement. “We have been assured by the manufacturer of the saliva testing kits that the test kits themselves are in ample supply. Most clinical laboratories in the U.S. are not using the saliva kits at this time to analyze samples.”
Uh-huh, but even if sports leagues are creating their own resources, that system consumes valuable testing materials and requires in-demand laboratory space, among other considerations.
“The argument still stands,” Dr. Tran said. “To say, ‘Well, we’re working with a private contractor,’ their ability to be able to make that partnership or arrangement only highlights or underscores that there’s an existing system of privilege where certain people and certain entities in the country are able to do that. Unfortunately, a huge proportion of the American population are unable to do that.”
