“Our experts are advising us that we don’t need a 14-day quarantine,” the commissioner told CNN anchors Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta. “What we will do is, the positive individual will be removed from the rest of the group. There will be a quarantine arrangement in each facility and in each city, and we’ll do contact tracing for the individuals that we believe there was contact with, and we will do point-of-care testing for those individuals, to minimize the likelihood that there’s been a spread.”
“We hope that we will be able to convince the vast majority of our players that it’s safe to return to work,” Manfred said. “The protocols for returning to play, the health-related protocols, are about 80 pages in length. They’re extraordinarily detailed.
“So we hope that we’ll be able to convince them that it’s safe. At the end of the day, however, if there’s a player with either health conditions or just their own personal doubts, we would never try to force them to come back to work. They can wait until they feel they’re ready to come.”
“All of our players would be tested multiple times a week — PCR testing to determine whether or not they have the virus,” Manfred said, referring to the polymerase chain reaction tests that would be shipped to the SMRTL lab in Utah and processed in 24 hours. “That testing would be supplemented less frequently by antibody testing as well.”
MLB is hoping to begin a second spring training, the first was interrupted by the pandemic in March, in June, followed by the start to the regular season in early July.
But that’s contingent on the public health situation at the time.
Want More From Sports Gossip?
For all the latest breaking Sports Gossip, be sure to follow SportsGossip.com on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
