How NBA Stars Are Helping The Fight Against COVID-19 Coronavirus

So maybe you aren’t a health care professional, a scientist, a public health official, a health policy maker, or a gigantic bottle of hand sanitizer. Nevertheless, there’s still plenty of things that you can do to help fight the COVID-19 causing coronavirus (SARS-CoV2). One of them is communications. If you’ve got a platform, that is a virtual one and not necessarily a real wooden platform, use it to help disseminate scientifically correct information about SARS-CoV2 and how to slow its spread. This is particularly important with all the misinformation swirling around out there like poop in a whirlpool.

Using their considerable platforms is what a number of NBA players have been doing since the new coronavirus outbreak became a pandemic and led to the suspension of the NBA season.

For example, there’s Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry. You know the two-time Most Valuable Player, the three-time NBA Champion, the I-am-going-to-shoot-the ball-from-another-area-code-and-make-it-in-the-basket, Steph Curry? Well, here’s a tweet from him emphasizing the importance of social distancing and good hand hygiene:

He even mentioned the catchphrase “flatten the curve,” which is why the NBA has suspended its season, many events have been canceled, schools and workplaces, and you should not be playing Twister at Happy Hours or even going to Happy Hours. The purpose of social distancing, as I described previously for Forbes, is to keep people separate from each other so that the darn virus can’t keep treating humans like Tinder dates and spreading from one person to another. Such social distancing can thus slow the spread of the virus and thus flattening the curve of cases per day over time.

In case you didn’t quite get the message from Curry that you should wash your polluted paws, two-time NBA All Star Victor Oladipo of the Indiana Pacers has another message for you. Wash your bleeping hands. This is his post on Instragram:

Have you washed your hands yet? Are you still palming your face with your filthy fingers as if your face were a basketball? Well, then maybe you’ll listen to Hall-of-Famer Earvin “Magic” Johnson, possibly the greatest point guard ever, certainly the one with the record number of teeth showing while smiling:

Presumably, Magic has to take off his five NBA Championship rings before washing his hands. Do you have any NBA Championship rings? If not, what’s your excuse then for not washing your hands?

Wash your hands. Lather up with soap for at least 20 seconds. Sing Happy Birthday twice while doing it. Or say Giannis Antetokounmpo twenty times.

And do all of these other things that the NBA recommends on this graphic:

The fact that the NBA and its players are disseminating these messages is important. Not everyone may follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website as they do an NBA player’s Instagram account. Yes, yes, yes, scientists are usually the coolest people at Happy Hours and in high school, right? But surprise, surprise, not everyone may hear or heed what scientists and public health officials have to say. That’s why having others amplify their scientific messages is important. NBA players can touch key segments of the population that may not always be easily reached by public health messaging.

Speaking of touch, SARS-CoV2 touched Utah Jazz star Donovan Mitchell directly, too directly. He became the second NBA player to test positive for SARS-CoV2. That’s a scary prospect since somewhere between 1% to 3.4% of those infected may not even survive the infection, based on the latest data. Mitchell did the right things and went into isolation as seen in this update via Instagram:

No symptoms is good news for Mitchell but also a good lesson for everyone else. As the star player told Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts, “I’m asymptomatic. I could walk down the street. If it wasn’t public knowledge that I was sick, you wouldn’t know it. That’s the scariest part about this virus. You may seem fine, be fine.” You know that song “Sexy and I Know It”? Well, the SARS-CoV2 is the exact opposite. You could have the virus and be spreading it without even knowing it. So even you don’t become sick yourself, you could end up getting others sick. In this case, sick is not the good sick as in “that’s sick” but the bad sick as in a fever and shortness of breath or even pneumonia or worse.

Dishing out info isn’t the only thing that Mitchell is doing. As the Utah Jazz just announced, Mitchell will be making a donation to help students at Granite School District in Salt Lake City, Utah, continue to get meals while the school remains shut during the pandemic. Unfortunately, social distancing does have its consequences. School isn’t just classes, homework, and the stuff that people do in High School Musical. It can be the only way for many students to get reasonable meals. Without school meals, a number of students may not be able to eat enough or have to subsist on something terrible for them like candy bar and potato chip sandwiches.

Another negative consequence of social distancing has been putting NBA arena employees out of work for a while. That ain’t good because people sort of need money to survive. Therefore, NBA players such as Curry, Cleveland Cavaliers forward Kevin Love, Detroit Pistons forward Blake Griffin, New Orleans Pelicans rookie forward Zion Williamson, and Milwaukee Bucks who-knows-what-position-he-really-plays Antetokounmpo have offered assists and donations. For example, here is what Antetokounmpo tweeted:

This is a tough time for many. There’s the uncertainty, the massive disruptions, the fear of a new virus that has proven that it can kill. But seeing NBA players come together like this and provide a bunch of assists is uplifting. They are providing an example of amplification, of the need to support the messages from the scientific and public health communities. After all, isn’t that what teamwork is all about when there is a common opponent?