College football during a pandemic: Miami’s team doctor discusses the return so far
It has been two weeks since the Miami Hurricanes formally welcomed 65 players back to campus for voluntary small-group workouts. The COVID-19 pandemic is still sweeping the country — and cases are particularly increasing in Florida — but Miami’s reintegration of players has apparently been smooth.
While athletic director Blake James said the university won’t reveal any testing information, no reports have surfaced suggesting the sort of outbreak which has disrupted workouts for other teams like the Clemson Tigers, LSU Tigers and Texas Longhorns.
The Hurricanes’ protocols are in line with what most teams are doing, and what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest. Miami began with a baseline testing protocol before workouts began June 15, testing players for both active cases and antibodies. Those who tested positive were placed in isolation, and contact tracing was used to deduce who else might have been exposed. As workouts have continued, players are having their temperatures taken daily and are tested for the coronavirus if symptomatic. Contact tracing is again used to ideally contain the virus before an outbreak begins.
“The first thing is to figure out what the federal and local requirements are,” medical director Dr. Lee Kaplan said. “It’s not building a plan from UM out. It’s actually the other direction. What is the CDC and what are the public health officials making regulations and-or suggestions?”
Education has been key
Kaplan, who is also the medical director for the Miami Marlins, said the first two weeks have gone mostly smoothly, “but that doesn’t make it easy.”
CDC recommendations and local guidelines call for more than just being reactive to a potential case. Beating the coronavirus means begin proactive. For the Hurricanes, this means staying six feet apart whenever possible and wearing masks for facial coverings whenever in a public area on campus, even when it means “ruffling some feathers.”
Mostly, being proactive has meant education, and the return plan Miami detailed in a release June 15 specifically mentioned “proper education and accommodations for student-athletes and staff.” Kaplan said one benefit the Hurricanes had was a robust telehealth protocol in place even before the pandemic hit the United States in March. Athletes and staff members were positioned well to talk with doctors over the phone or via video chat in the early days of the pandemic.
“We were well ahead of COVID on doing telehealth, so our primary care sports medicine physicians — everybody that’s sick in the athletic department, they’ve been doing telehealth visits to try to source out whether or not these are patients that should be tested,” Kaplan said. “What you need to do is make sure that you have plans and processes in place that if somebody does get sick, you can quickly mitigate it. The goal’s not to shut anything down. The goal is to try to mitigate any issues that are going on and from there, separate those athletes, but everything else continue.”
Kaplan also gave credit to coach Manny Diaz, who has always taken a measured approach when speaking about the virus and its potential effects on college football. Diaz has entirely stayed away from making predictions about whether he thinks the season will start on time, whether fans will be allowed inside Hard Rock Stadium and whether practices will be able to go on in a normal manner, always deferring to medical experts and public officials — the people who will actually make the decisions affecting football in the coming months.
“Coach Diaz and the athletic department have done an excellent job,” Kaplan said. “They’ve had multiple Zoom meetings to be educated on this, so I think that’s part of it is just getting ahead on it.”
What about herd immunity?
A popular theory bandied about by nonexperts as reports have surfaced about potential outbreaks at some schools is, at first glance, a counterintuitive one: Is it actually good all these athletes are getting COVID now?
These athletes are some of the healthiest people on the planet, the theory posits, and the mortality and hospitalization rates for people in the age range for most college athletes is minuscule. Why wouldn’t an entire team just try to get sick in June or July, so herd immunity is built up by the team the season starts in August?
This suggestion angers most medical professionals. When Kaplan was presented with the theory, he paused for about five seconds, sighed a couple times and then gave a measured response.
“The problem with the herd immunity thing is not that people don’t slowly get it. Are you preventing the people that are most at-risk?” Kaplan said. “The other thing is that it’s not necessarily an overnight thing when we’ve tried to mitigate the effects of a rush on our health systems.”
The top priority during a pandemic is to not get the virus, obviously, and letting the coronavirus run wild through Miami’s roster would potentially mean 90 new spreaders of the virus — 90 young people who could potentially spread the virus to an older, more at-risk population both within the athletic department and outside it. Plus, there’s still a lot to learn about the virus and its potential long-term effects. Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert on Sunday, for example, said Wednesday he still hasn’t fully regained his sense of smell after battling a mild case of the coronavirus in March.
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A learning experience
To describe the way sports teams are handling the coronavirus, Kaplan does a lot of talking about planes. First, just because there’s still a lot to learn about the virus, doesn’t mean the medical staff is “flying blind.”
“I don’t think we’re flying blind at all. I think we’re actually the opposite. We’re flying with our eyes wide open,” Kaplan said. “You just have to understand what the situation is, not do anything risky than we need to and go from there.”
This means another airplane analogy is apt.
“We’re trying to almost fuel the jet while we’re in the air,” Kaplan said.
Another group of players officially join the team Monday and more teams will start trickling back into the facilities in the next month. In August, the full student body will flock back to South Florida for the fall semester and it will only get more complicated to keep the coronavirus in check.
Until then, Miami will keep learning.
“We’re learning every day,” Kaplan said. “The biggest thing is to stay nimble, stay into it, try to autocorrect as much as we can.”
