N.F.L. and Other Sports Schedules in Flux Amid New Covid Surge

“That would be a terrible mistake,” Swartzberg said of holding the convention as planned. “Looking at the trajectory, it’s hard to believe we’ll be out of this Delta surge and the Omicron surge by then.”

What is sobering for sports leagues about the latest disruptions is that the vast majority of athletes are vaccinated — around 95 percent in the N.F.L. and N.B.A. More than 130 players were placed on N.F.L. team’s reserve/Covid-19 lists, including at least 10 from the Rams, Browns and Washington. Alan Sills, the chief medical officer of the N.F.L., said on Wednesday that two-thirds of N.F.L. players diagnosed as positive are asymptomatic, and most of the rest have mild symptoms.

Teams have incentivized getting vaccinated by eliminating restrictions for athletes who have received their shots. But leagues have done little to spur athletes to get booster shots, which have shown that they help increase resistance to the most recent variants.

“We have better tools now in December 2021 than to shut anything down completely,” said Amesh Adjala, an infectious disease physician at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. He noted that vaccinated hospital staff where he works are tested less frequently than most professional athletes, and what policies to adopt are as much a sports management question as they are a health and safety one.

“It depends on the risk tolerance of players, owners and fans,” Adjala said.

At the University of Alabama, what is happening around the country is being watched carefully. The men’s basketball team stays in its facility, the women’s basketball team is limited to its facility and the football team is in its own building. “Really, we’re kind of in our own little cocoon over here,” men’s basketball coach Nate Oats said in a video news conference on Friday.

“I’ll say this,” he added. “It seems that throughout this thing that certain programs do everything they can and they still get hit with some Covid.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/sports/football/nfl-games-postponed-covid-surge.html