An unnamed Red Sox minor leaguer has tested positive for COVID-19, the team announced Tuesday. According to the statement:
His positive test occurred on March 23rd following his return home and he was last at the Fenway South Player Development Complex on March 15th. Given the timing of the player’s positive test and travel, we believe it is more likely that he contracted COVID-19 after he left Fort Myers. Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution, the club is shutting down Fenway South from all activity effective today, for at least two weeks.
The statement goes on to say that the facility will now receive a “deep cleaning” and that anyone who came into contact with this player has been instructed to go into self-quarantine for two weeks.
This illustrates the potential dangers of attempting to maintain camps and group workouts during the pandemic. According to Chris Cotillo of MassLive.com, many Red Sox players, including major leaguers, had still been working out at the facility (Twitter link). Hopefully, the team is correct in its assessment that the player in question contracted the virus after leaving.
This is now the fourth case of a positive test for COVID-19 for someone connected to Major League Baseball, joining a Reds employee and two minor leaguers in the Yankees system. The statement notes that the player in question is “doing well” but does not elaborate because of privacy concerns.
They are really gonna end up canceling 2020 aren’t they
The year or the season?
Possibly both, at this rate
Nope. Too much money at stake for this “epidemic” to ruin it. By the way more than 80% of people and 99% of ones in his age group he’ll have mild symptoms.
Why the quotations…
It’s not about him for the most part. It’s about not allowing him to spread it to more vulnerable people. How do you not understand this.
You are aware young are getting it now and a 18 year old died yesterday.
The Truth is thetruth foolishly does not believe in an epidemic. He is probably some high schooler
I doubt the season gets cancelled
Player gets flu. Media continues panic.
That is what the headline SHOULD say.
United States is holding steady right around 1%…..not comparable with Italy.
20k deaths in US from Influenza during flu season…compared to 1k deaths from Coronavirus in US…A little prospective people! Media has created chaos that’s focuses on the LOW HANGING FRUIT
you don’t know how numbers work right? you cant compare total deaths when people are still getting sick with it. if we keep dragging our feet we’ll be beyond 20K in no time flat.
well both numbers continue to rise simultaneously. Influenza was just 16k not very long ago….soooo how can the Tortoise realistically catch up with the Hare in this situation?! …please explain how numbers work properly again?
you know what @darkside830…forget I said anything. Just trying to help you and @darkstar61 have some perspective and not spread the Worry. But I don’t have the energy anymore hahaha…..anyone else who reads this do your part as i am, as we all should be doing! But don’t feed the negativity and stay strong!!!
Braves – When the overwhelming response by people is to hoard toilet paper for a non-gastrointestinal virus, they have definitely targeted the low hanging fruit. Critical thinking has been overrun by irrational panic.
People are loading up on toilet paper because they are preparing not to leave their home for 1-2 months. You can figure out ways to eat and such, but you can not easily get by without toilet paper.
Ensuring you are prepared with toilet paper for possibly being locked up for months isnt a sign of “low hanging fruit” in any way – if anything, those questioning why people would be gathering months worth of supplies are the “low hanging fruit” that are clearly not prepared for what may very be coming
+darkstar
Thank you. Its truly mind-boggling that people are questioning why people are getting supplies, as if multiple countries arent completely locked down right now.
Dodgers, that might be technically true but look at certain hotspots. The U.S. is vastly larger than Italy. I live on Long Island where every day the reporting reflects how it’s getting worse, not better. I’ve only been out to go to the pharmacy and supermarket in the last ten days with one exception. Yesterday I delivered supplies I had to my doctor who simply can’t get basics. As I have a handicapped wife and my own disabilities, I naturally order in bulk. Little did I know my getting by the case exam gloves, antibacterial soap and wipes would allow him to continue to treat patients.
Thank you for sharing with your doctor.
New York has over 20k cases just as of now. Wait until the hospitals and ICUs are over run with elders and immunocompromised. People who should be able to be helped back to full health are going to be dead in some kind of holding cell. The threat of exponentiality is so abstract to some people and it boggles my mind.
so? 1% of the US population is ~3 million people. do we want 3 million people dead
I could swear that I had already seen this on a ticker tape under ESPN when I was in a bowling alley like a month ago. This is some deja-vu level weirdness.
Seems to be no middle ground about the virus. There’s “we’re all going to die” and the it’s “nothing at all.” I’m leaning toward the possibility that it’s political. Possibility.
If the same number of people got corona that get the flu, you are talking tens of millions in the hospital and more than a million dead in just the US.
That is without even taking into account how many other injuries and such would need to go untreated because the hospitals would all be overrun by Corona patients
And this spreads much faster than the flu does
The shutdown of cities, states and even countries is in a desperate attempt to stop that world altering outcome from happening
Even if we happen to avoid a worldwide collapse after all of this, it will be directly because of these desperate measures we took and the other side will say, “see it wasn’t that bad”. If we went on our normal lives, you’re talking about tens of millions dead.
This disease puts sports in perspective. While it’s a great distraction, sports athletes and talk about who belongs in the Hall, just doesn’t matter. The true heroes are the medical first responders, those deliverers who continue to bring packages and food to those that shouldn’t go out and some of our government elected officials who have done a remarkable job. Governor Cuomo if your listening, thank you!
I do enjoy cuomo totally putting deblasio in his place and making him so insignificant as mayor. That was at least enjoyable to see. I have to give cuomo credit for doing a decent job. I have to say most politicians have done a decent job. Yes, president included. I would say rand Paul is an idiot, Nancy and chuck are ridiculous, and the jack ass senators and congress that made money off this by selling stocks when they knew things were bad before the public did. Those all are worthless. Other than them, I am pleased. Could and should things be better, yes, but given what this could have been, I would say decent job.
its just not. no politicians (for the most part) are pushing anyone to any side. amazingly, they’re actually mostly being quite reasonable about it. but i do agree with the polarization, though that’s mostly just ib part like politics, actually – the most vocal are towards either extreme.
lets stop jumping to conclusions here and admit the obvious – none of us are health professionals, and even they know very little about what will happen here. what we do know, though, is that it has a much higher mortality rate than the flu, but places like South Korea have already done well dealing with this, and we alraedy have great signs for a working treatment and vaccine that could both appear in the (relatively) near future. society will not collapse, in fact, if anything, it may just be a wakeup call on a few things, namdely that we are hopelessly ignorant and ill-informed.
This is why comments need to be turned off on subjects such as this.
Why? Because you disagree with someone here? Because people are having a discussion?
I don’t agree or disagree with anyone here, I just don’t think it’s appropriate for non-health professionals on a baseball website to be discussing what is worse, the flu vs. the coronavirus when no one knows what tomorrow, let alone next week or the week after or the month or months after will bring, but whatever gets your rocks off, begamin.
There is no comparison to be had, and it is a simple math equation
Flu will spread at a 1.3 rate, put 0.3% in a hospital and kill 0.01-0.03% of those infected
Corona is spreading at a 2.5 rate, putting about 15% in a hospital and killing around 1% of those infected
Mathematically, those two things are not comparable in any possible way
It’s kind of like saying little leaguers are better hitters than major leaguers. Factually, little leaguers get more hits than major leaguers each year, but does that make little leaguers better hitters? No, it’s solely because there are so many more of them. We would all agree someone saying little leaguers are better hitters than ML hitters would be a fool
The flu sucks, but is a part of life we are forced to live with. Meanwhile, if not handled properly, this disease has the capability to forever alter the course of the planet, and has already crippled the world for more than a month. That is why it is being treated as it is instead of it being treated like a common flu, and why people saying garbage like “Player gets flu. Media continues panic” are getting called out for being fools spreading absolute nonsense. They might as well be telling us little leaguers are better hitters than MLers
we’re all non-baseball professionals and yet we talk about which teams are worse/better when we have no idea what tomorrow will bring. considering that covid19 is affecting everyones lives, as well as the baseball world, its extremely appropriate to talk about it.
suppression of communication is a disgraceful suggestion.
Agreed.
Just part of the Red Sox/Yankees rivalry
I sure hope many of you don’t procreate.
The world is ending isn’t it?
Of course not.
But we know roughly how this is spreading and what is needed to contain it. Places like China and South Korea locked down their populations completely and monitored every single person infected to understand and control its spread. Doing that, it took them both 8-10 weeks to get things under control
First Europe, and now the US, did not do that, so our spreads got out of control. That doesnt mean it will stay out of control, but it does mean our pain is going to hit much faster, harder and last longer than if we had taken the steps that were needed.
Most people are smarting up, doing things like isolating, or at minimum serious distancing. That will help slow the spread greatly and ideally get us past it faster.
But the more and more people try to downplay the severity, the more people will not take this seriously. Those not taking it seriously will keep the spread alive and well, and prolong the time we are all affected. Ideally in 5-8 weeks (depending on exactly where we are on the curve) we are looking like we are getting this under control as well, but if people do unbelievably mindless things like cram in for Easter mass, then we are likely looking at months more of this here. Not forever, and not world ending, but months more of the pain we are seeing
For many it has, yes. How many deaths across the world do we need to see before this debate over the severity ends?
I see the site has been overun by deniers. If you look at what the numbers have done in the past 7-10 days then we will surpass the swine flu and influenza in no time flat. I remember one denier saying just last week that we wouldn’t even reach 1K deaths. Well a week later and in a couple minutes we will blow past 1K at a 33% increase per day clip. And that’s with some of us practicing social distancing and slowing it down. If people like thetruth and the rest of you deniers also practiced social distancing aggressively we could flatten this curve. But noooo. Some people gotta deny. Can’t be inconvenienced to pitch in during a pandemic. It’s the lack of ventilators, medical supplies like gloves and coats and masks, doctors and hospital beds that will kill people off in droves if we don’t slow this down. But don’t listen to the experts like I do. Listen to online commenters like thetruth who have medical STUDENTS for friends. As if they’re experts in virology and infectious diseases, the guys who really know.
At the rate deaths are accumulating we will BLOW PAST the swine flu in about 10 DAYS and the flu in 11 DAYS. And then there are all the days after that, when the infrastructure really begins to collapse, that the deaths will not only continue but accelerate. Then thetruth and the rest of the deniers will really look like the dangerous fools they are.
It just needs to be said that we do not know for sure that will be the case, and ideally it will not.
But we do know how to best control it, we’ve seen countries like China and Soth Korea be able to handle the outbreak with intense monitoring and isolation of the population. We know how that can translate into a country that doesnt even take extreme isolation measures with it. Germany is an example of a country that treated each possible case as a ticking bomb from the very beginning, and they have not suffered as much over time because of it.
Italy, Spain, France, etc did not take it seriously like that, instead allowing it to spread freely, unmonitored in their countries for quite a while before finally locating the issues when it was too late.
The US is in the same, to an even worse situation as the Italy group, and yes, because of that we are seeing doubling of our numbers every 2-3 days, just like those countries do. This is the result of having infected walking around for weeks without even having a way to test them in large numbers until the last few days.
So again, ideally it does not take place, and maybe it will not. But we don’t know for sure, we only know the path we have chosen to take is not a good sign. No way of getting around it, we failed about as badly as we could ever possibly fail with regards to identifying and monitoring the infected, and our leaders did not take it seriously at all until it was way too late. So if we do not see death numbers at least comparable to Italy, then we can only call it dumb luck.