Dr. Fauci on the 2021 MLB Season: ‘You’ve Got to Do as Best as You Can to Protect the Players’

Although cases are trending down, they are still higher than when the 2020 season started on July 23. So are you more or less optimistic that a longer 162-game season can be completed?

The thing that I have some optimism about — but I would have to underscore that it’s cautious optimism — is that, even though the cases are high relative to this time last year, they are on the down slope. And as every day goes by, it looks like it gets less and less. If you look at a month or so ago, we were having 300,000 to 400,000 cases a day. Now for the last few days in a row, we’ve had less than 100,000 cases, which is remarkably diminished.

So as the slopes keep going down, we’re going in the right direction. Superpose upon that the fact that we now have highly efficacious vaccines that are being rolled out. We are vaccinating more and more people each day. And we will have more and more vaccines available as the weeks and the months go by. So it looks like we’re heading in the right direction. Whether or not it stays in that direction is going to depend on a bunch of things: Are people going to continue to be careful and to implement public health measures? What is going to happen with the variants? Are they going to make things more difficult by having an additional spike in infections? I don’t know.

The big wild card in this is really the variants. Because the variant that is in the U.K. that is likely going to become more dominant in the U.S., the models tell us that will happen probably by the end of March. If we don’t adhere to public health measures the way we should, that could take off on us. That’s the reason why I say I’m cautiously optimistic because we could turn around and go the opposite direction pretty quickly.

The regulations may vary across different communities, but what do you think of the likelihood that there will be fans in the stands during spring training and the regular season?

The positive aspect of baseball is that most of it is outdoors. And if you space people well enough, you get people to wear masks, you have situations that people don’t crowd at the concessions near each other to get food and things like that, you can pull it off in a pretty safe way, I believe.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/sports/baseball/mlb-season-covid-dr-fauci.html