Fauci on the Return of Football: 'The Virus Will Make the Decision for Us'

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Donald Trump’s top coronavirus adviser, claimed that the NFL’s football season could be seriously affected by the pandemic even if the virus is waning by fall.

Speaking to NBC Sports, Fauci insisted that teams could have a significant problem if more than one, perhaps as many as four players, were diagnosed with the virus during the season.

“You got a problem there,” said the director of the National Institutes for Health since 1984. “You know why? Because it is likely that if four of them are positive and they’ve been hanging around together, that the other ones that are negative are really positive. So I mean, if you have one outlier [only one player testing positive], I think you might get away. But once you wind up having a situation where it looks like it’s spread within a team, you got a real problem. You gotta shut it down.”

If an entire team ends up being “shut down” for 14 days in quarantine, then they would have to forfeit the games they are missing. If several teams end up in this situation, it could disrupt the entire season, Fauci said.

Fauci added that it would be “malpractice in medicine” to put players who tested positive on the field.

NBC pressed Fauci about when the country, including sports programs, could get back to normal. But he said he had no idea, and no one can make such predictions.

“The virus,” he claimed, “will make the decision for us.”

Still, Fauci did lend some hope that football could be back soon.

“I think it’s feasible that negative testing players could play to an empty stadium,” Fauci said. “Is it guaranteed? No way . . . There will be virus out there and you will know your players are negative at the time they step onto the field. You’re not endangering . . . Also, if the virus is so low that even in the general community the risk is low, then I could see filling a third of the stadium or half the stadium so people could be six feet apart. I mean, that’s something that is again feasible depending on the level of infection. I keep getting back to that: It’s going to depend. Like, right now, if you fast forward, and it is now September. The season starts. I say you can’t have a season—it’s impossible. There’s too much infection out there. It doesn’t matter what you do. But I would hope that by the time you get to September, it’s not gonna be the way it is right now.”

The doc added, “If you really want to be in a situation where you want to be absolutely certain, you’d test all the players before the game. And you say, Those who are infected: Sorry, you’re sidelined. Those who are free: Get in there and play.”

He also called for repeated testing, maybe even several times a week.

Fauci imagines that the NFL, at least, has the luxury of time since the league does not begin playing until fall, and by late summer, the virus will likely be much weaker. But even with that, Fauci said that there would be a second round of the virus in the fall.

“The answer is not going to be black and white,” Fauci said. “When I said there’s no doubt the virus is going to return, that is in response to some who have said ‘Oh, it’s just going to disappear.’ So, unlike the virus SARS, back in 2002, when we had an outbreak of about 8,000 people and close to 800 deaths, and then the virus just essentially petered out by good public health measures by the simple reason that it wasn’t efficiently or effectively transmitted from one person to another. In other words, it was not an efficient spreader. So that when you tamp down on it with public health measures, it actually got to the point where it disappeared.

“That’s not the case with this novel coronavirus. It is so transmissible, and it is so widespread throughout the world, that even if our infections get well-controlled and go down dramatically during the summer, there is virtually no chance it will be eradicated. Which means there will be infections in the Southern Hemisphere, in South Africa, in Argentina, places like that. And with the travel, the global travel, every single day, of literally hundreds of thousands of people coming into the United States every day from all over, there’s no chance we’re going to be virus-free.”

Fauci ended the interview offering his help to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. If league officials want to consult him, he’d be happy to respond. But he warned that the path forward would be tenuous.

“It is uncertain. You’ll have to play it by ear according to the level of infection in the community,” he said.

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