Football has been on Larry Chang's mind the last few days. He cannot help thinking about his Baltimore Ravens and the return of games this fall.
"I'm a huge NFL fan," he said, musing about the team's star quarterback. "I want to see Lamar Jackson back on the field."
But as an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in the city where the Ravens play, Chang asks an important question: "Is that realistic?"
There has been a lot of talk about the return of sports to a nation yearning for some hint of normalcy amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Major League Baseball has discussed quarantining all 30 of its teams in Arizona, keeping players, coaches and staff in a virus-free BioDome facsimile and holding games in empty ballparks. The Ultimate Fighting Championship reportedly has scheduled bouts on tribal land in Central California, and its president, Dana White, has floated the idea of staging subsequent bouts on a sequestered island.
Even President Donald Trump has weighed in, envisioning packed grandstands in late summer, saying, "I want fans back in the arenas."
But Chang isn't the only one who worries about resuming play, even with no spectators. He and other public health experts fear it would be a risky proposition if the outbreak persists or, as some expect, recedes during summer and reappears in fall.
"I would be very nervous about having any sports, whether it's football or basketball or even baseball," said Dr. Richard Jackson, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official and professor emeritus at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health.
Jackson dismisses the idea that professional athletes, young and fit, hold some kind of "get out of jail free card" when it comes to the coronavirus.
"This is not just the plain-old flu," he says.
