Korean Baseball League Starting Play Shows How Far We Are From Sports Returning In U.S.

The Korean Baseball League is back, and at least six games per week will be broadcast on ESPN. The first contest aired live early Tuesday morning, with multiple replays slated throughout the week. It is one of the first optimistic developments for sports fans in the U.S., who have been without their beloved games since March 11, when the NBA became the first sports leagues to suspend operations amidst the coronavirus pandemic.

But in reality, the return of the KBO is a sobering sign of how much work the U.S. still must accomplish in order to contain the virus. At this point, the U.S. appears months away from mitigating the spread of COVID-19 as successfully as South Korea, which is still prepared to shut down the KBO for three weeks if even one more player tests positive.

Games are also being played without fans, and coaches and umpires are wearing masks and gloves at all times.

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, when President Donald Trump was still claiming the virus was “under tremendous control,” the disparity in testing between the U.S. and South Korea was a glaring symbol of our government’s failure to combat the pandemic. At one point in early March, only 472 people were tested for the coronavirus in the U.S., compared to 55,000 people in South Korea. The Southeast Asian nation has one-sixth the population of America.

Even today, testing levels remain woefully short in the U.S. The White House’s guidelines advise states to test 2% of their population, which an Associated Press study finds 40 do not meet, including several that have started to reopen their economies, such as Georgia and Texas. (Texas reported its highest COVID-19 death toll one day before Gov. Greg Abott enacted measures to reopen businesses.)

As Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Romer explains in The New Yorker, testing is the only way to instill the confidence consumers need to resume their daily lives and economic activity. “The thing about testing is that it’s easy to explain and it doesn’t frighten people the way digital contact tracing does,” he said to Isaac Chotiner.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has been making the argument of testing in relation to sports for weeks. He said last week some sports league may have to sacrifice their seasons if testing doesn’t ramp up. “Safety, for the players and for the fans, trumps everything,” he told the New York Times
NYT
. “If you can’t guarantee safety, then unfortunately you’re going to have to bite the bullet and say, ‘We may have to go without this sport for this season.’”

ESPN reports the NBA has determined it would need approximately 15,000 tests to return, even if players were held in a quarantine bubble. In a memo sent to teams last week, the NBA implores organizations to currently avoiding testing all players and employees for the coronavirus, even as practice facilities are expected to start opening up. Testing asymptotic athletes while there is a nationwide test shortage would be a PR nightmare, as the NBA experienced in March, when large numbers of its players were tested despite exhibiting no symptoms.

In other words, it is foolhardy to think about restarting sports while there is still a dearth of tests. Currently, the U.S. is conducting an average of 200,000 coronavirus tests daily, but researchers say a daily average of 500,000-700,000 tests is likely needed to safely reopen.

To state the obvious, we are far from reaching that mark.

South Korea, meanwhile, reported its first confirmed coronavirus case Jan. 20, and saw its infection rate peak in late February with a high of 909 new confirmed cases in a single day. But the curve soon flattened. By mid-March, South Korea was testing an average of 12,000 people per day, and sending results to people’s phones within 24 hours. In addition, South Korea used aggressive digital contact tracing in order to isolate those who were infected.

Today, South Korea can legitimately talk about moving forward after the coronavirus, with an understanding the virus could return in another wave at a later date. On April 30, it reported no new domestic cases of COVID-19 for the first time since February. In total, South Korea had just under 11,000 confirmed cases and 300 coronavirus-related deaths in a country with a population of 53 million.

Conversely, the U.S. is currently seeing an average of 25,000 confirmed cases per day, with models pulled together by the Federal Emergency Management Agency forecasting 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month. As states continue to reopen their economies, the White House’s projections say the daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1 — a dramatic increase from the current average of about 1,750.

South Korea, for comparison’s sake, reported 254 deaths in total. Population differences aside, the coronavirus reality in the U.S. is much grimmer, and far deadlier.

A powerful political push to return to business may win over numbers and facts. But according to harrowing figures, the U.S. is still at the apex of its battle against the coronavirus, and without the proper testing tools to go forward.

Enjoy the KBO, because it might be all we have for a long time.