KNOXVILLE — The NCAA established a coronavirus advisory panel to guide its response to the outbreak of the disease.
Amesh Adalja, M.D., Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, is part of the NCAA coronavirus advisory panel.
Adalja discussed what games throughout college football and at Neyland Stadium could look like during the 2020 season.
Bundesliga, a professional soccer league in Germany, returned to having matches this weekend and Adalja views how college football games this fall could be similar.
Having student-athletes playing football, along with medical staff, coaches and bench players spread out through the stands to social distance could be what gamedays at Neyland Stadium looks like in 2020.
Games could even be without the Pride of the Southland Band playing Rocky Top.
“That is probably what we are looking at,” Adalja told Vols Wire.
“You really have to look at the equation of the fact that there is likely to be an exposure when you have that many people together,” Adalja continued. “If that is the case, there is going to contact tracing. The number of people would be overwhelming for a health department to track down and do all of the contact tracing. It is labor intensive.
“Imagine if you had 10,000 or 500 people there, and there is an exposure. That becomes very difficult for contact tracers. You cannot do the same types of things to the fans that you can do to the players. The players might be getting routinely tested, but there are going to be people that trickle in to watch the game and you do not know if they are positive or negative. When you think about fans, even several hundred, that becomes very difficult for the health department to do contact tracing. So the first step is to re-socialize the athletes in a safe manner. We do not need to think about fans in stadiums until we get to a better stage in terms of contact tracing and ideally a vaccine.”
Tennessee is scheduled to kickoff the season against Charlotte on Sept. 5 at Neyland Stadium.
“There are ways to improve the safety of the players. When you talk about fans, I do not think that should be something that should be on the table in the beginning stages of trying to socialize sports after the pandemic. I think it will be fan-free and televised types of games in all sports.
“When it comes to a testing protocol, people are optimistic about this, but I do not think we have everything worked out yet. People are trying to come up with protocols using the testing technology we have and trying to decide what the frequency of testing is and what to do when you have an exposure — and how all of that gets worked out. These are hard problems that we are trying to solve. There is not a perfect answer for any of it. I do not think there is a specific date where we can get all of this sorted out.” — Dr. Amesh Adalja, M.D., NCAA coronavirus advisory panel