COVID-19 pandemic fostered collaboration among chief medical officers of major sports
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Chief medical officers who convened at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy Association of North America Combined Meeting said they had to quickly adapt when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“I think the thing that we learned, obviously, was that this was bigger than sports,” Gary A. Green, MD, who is chief medical officer (CMO) of the MLB, said.
Other participants in the session, moderated by Peter A. Indelicato, MD, echoed that sentiment regarding the challenges to various U.S. professional sports teams immediately at the outset of the pandemic, such as suddenly dealing with a multitude of public health agencies and COVID-19 testing of players.
“I think one of the specific challenges with hockey is that it’s a close contact sport played indoors and [with] professional hockey, it’s played in two countries. So, we dealt with both the American and the Canadian health systems as we kind of tried to fit the game into their rules,” Bradley J. Nelson, MD, CMO of the NHL, said.
Play in a ‘bubble’
Margot Putukian, MD, CMO for Major League Soccer, said the league was 2 weeks into its season — which ended up proceeding and being completed with matches played in a “bubble” in Orlando — when COVID-19 hit and two MLS teams had outbreaks of COVID-19 from June 28 to Aug. 11, 2020.
“We had 22 individuals test positive in our isolation area,” Putukian said, but there were “no positive tests after that.”
The panelists said some positives came out of the situation they encountered with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Salvia testing
According to Green, when MLB realized that nasal COVID-19 testing would be impractical if players and staff needed to be tested almost daily, it turned to saliva testing, which was convenient and accurate.
“We were able to do 200,000 tests in 2020, with about a 0.05% positive rate and we ended up being able to play 900 games in 2020. We only missed two games and we went 58 days without a positive [case], until the well-publicized last game of the World Series,” Green said.
NFL CMO Allen K. Sills, MD, when forced to consider the expert medical advice of federal health authorities at the outset of the pandemic, said he encountered a wide variety of standards imposed on the league.
Player safety
“Back [on] March 11, walking out of the NBA offices at 2 a.m. vs. now, it’s just incredibly different,” John P. DiFiori, MD, FACSM, CMO of the NBA, said. “Our main goal was that if we were going to be able to play, we had to make sure that our players were as safe or safer playing basketball than they would be in their communities. We all like to practice evidence-based medicine. Well, there wasn’t any evidence. We were talking to people all over the world — Australia, European soccer — trying to get as much information as we can.”
Figuring out the cardiac effects from COVID-19 that might present in basketball players who contracted the virus was a challenge for DiFiori and others involved with the NBA.
“We worked closely with our teams, our team physicians and the players association; probably one of the most rewarding collaborative experiences, I think, I will ever participate in — [there were] many hours talking with my colleagues and the players association,” DiFiori said.
Although policies and procedures seemingly had to be adapted almost every week, “Again, I think it was the collaboration and the communication that in a large part led to success,” he said.
Similar challenges
By March 2020, the CMOs in the session realized they faced similar challenges and met about twice per week to discuss these and share information, Putukian said.
Sills said the CMOs collaborated to complete two published papers on the COVID-19 pandemic, to date, which was not an easy task due to all the clearances needed for the release of player data and other pertinent information.
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