LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — It’s the middle of the night, and the phone rings.
At about 3:30 in the morning, here at Disney World, on Night 1 of bubble life, I couldn’t quite spot the wailing, screeching, startling sound emanating from the middle of my room.
A fire alarm? A bomb threat? A Quiet Riot concert?
Advertisement
I didn’t know where I was while the phone was ringing off of its hook, let alone it was in fact the phone making all of that racket in the first place. By the time I could place it, the call was over and the red light signaling voicemail was blinking.
It was then when the fear of God washed over me, from my head to my toes.
The central tenet of being in the NBA Bubble is the daily COVID-19 tests for the hundreds of players, coaches, team personnel, and media staying on campus. Each day, someone from BioReference Laboratories swabs the back of our throats and the tips of our noses. The samples are collected and driven 75 minutes away to a lab in Melbourne, Fla., for analysis. A negative test is relayed via email. A positive, the phone rings.
Oh no.
Fighting through the temporary paralysis that comes with realizing why someone might be dialing me at this hour, I pressed the message button. Whomever called had hung up without saying a word. A prankster.
Tests take, on average, about 12 to 15 hours to process, according to the league and the lab. When I remembered that little nugget, at about, oh, 3:41 a.m., I realized it was too soon for my 10 p.m. test from Sunday to be back. And sure enough, at noon Monday, my email inbox pinged with a note from the lab — negative.
The big news coming from Disney Monday was that Houston Rockets star Russell Westbrook tested positive for the virus. He made the announcement himself, saying on social media he failed his test before the Rockets left for Florida. He was quarantined, feeling well, and looking forward to joining his team for the season’s restart, which is July 30.
— Russell Westbrook (@russwest44) July 13, 2020
Also not at Disney is the Rockets’ other star, James Harden, like Westbrook a former MVP. Also absent is Houston’s Luc Mbah a Moute. Neither the two players nor the team has said why, though coach Mike D’Antoni has said he hopes that duo and Westbrook could be at Disney as early as this week.
“To be determined,” D’Antoni said Monday. “I’m hoping and it’s hope. I probably shouldn’t be saying they’ll be here in the middle of the week. I don’t know. I’m hoping they will be. There’s a good chance. And we’ll deal with it. If they are, it’s great, and if not we’ll deal with it.”
Advertisement
Also on Monday, the NBA and the players’ union announced that two players (out of 322) tested positive since arriving on campus. They are, as of now, unnamed to the public and are away from their teams in isolation (either at home or otherwise not on the NBA’s campus). In a joint statement, the league and union said the tests were taken before the players’ 36-hour, on-campus quarantine ended. It means they picked up the virus either at home or on the plane, and chances of them spreading it to teammates were small.
To get out of isolation and back to work, whether it’s a player, coach, other member of a team’s traveling party, or the media, one must: A.) Be asymptomatic; B.) Return two, consecutive negative tests over a period of more than 24 hours; C. ) Undergo a medical screening; D.) In the players’ case, get a cardiac screening.
Depending on when one contracts the virus, and however much havoc the virus chooses to wreak on the individual, and how long it chooses to hang out in the body, a path to clearance could take weeks. That is why I was scared shitless when my phone rang on my first night.
“If it comes back positive, hell, you know, it is what it is,” said Milwaukee Bucks star and reigning MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo. “That’s life, but I think I’m doing the right thing. I’m very careful. I’m washing my hands. I’m wearing my mask. My mask is there, in my bag. But I think we’re in a place that we are extremely safe. This is the third day, fourth day. I really don’t know worry or sit down and be nervous about the result. I just go get tested and just wait to see what’s gonna happen.”
Giannis’ coach, Mike Budenholzer, said: “There’s always a little bit of anxiousness any time you’re taking your test. We’ve been testing every other day for it seems like two weeks. Testing has become something that’s definitely become part of the norm. Waiting to hear the results? I’m human, we’re all human, we’re probably waiting to hear and hoping we get the negative. I think that’s human.”
Advertisement
Cancer screenings happen every three or four or six months. HIV tests, they aren’t as common as, say, picking up dry cleaning or ordering from Starbucks.
But each and every day, if you’re going to be in the NBA or work in close proximity to the league, you’ll get a swab up the nose and then try not to wonder if over the course of the last 24 hours you’d contracted a virus that can: A.) Kill you or someone you love if you give it to them — 137,000 have died in the U.S. from COVID-19; B.) Make you very sick for a long time; C.) Take away your taste buds; D.) For the sake of this discussion, rob you and maybe your basketball team of a chance to play for a championship.
The odds are high enough that the NBA made daily testing mandatory for its Bubble existence.
“These guys (the NBA’s front office) know as much about this (COVID-19) as anybody else on the planet,” said Dr. Jon R. Cohen, of BioReference Laboratories, the league’s testing partner. “They went to unbelievable lengths to understand the science, understand the disease, understanding what you should do testing wise. It was just an incredible journey to get to where we finally got to.”
A bunch of the other things the league thought of to keep everybody safe showed up at my door Monday. A digital thermometer with Bluetooth capabilities; a little machine that slides on your finger and measures oxygen in the blood; an Oura ring (well, not the actual ring, in this case, but dummies to use for sizing) that can predict if you’re headed toward coronavirus contraction; a slew of masks, all with The Logo; the buzzer thing that goes off when I’m within six feet of another person. Also, an explainer of how to download, activate and use the app the NBA created to monitor each and every person’s health who is here.
Every day, bubble dwellers must type into their phones any COVID-y symptoms, whether or not they’d been around someone who has or might have the virus, take their temperatures (98.1, baby), and their pulse-ox (anything above 95 is groovy — I clocked a 98), and log all of this into the app.
If the league doesn’t like your answers, or you fail to do it, you’ll be stopped from entering a game or practice venue for further questioning.
Advertisement
All of these tools, if used correctly, can certainly ease one’s fears about whether or not the virus is living in him or her. But it’s the test that counts the most.
Neither Cohen nor the NBA could say precisely how many tests are being taken each day, but Cohen said the BioReference tests are “highly accurate, 95 percent,” because they are analyzed in a lab, as opposed to on site. BioReference is also doing testing for Major League Soccer’s bubble atmosphere at Disney. The company has labs in five states (Maryland, New Jersey, Texas and California are the others), but analyzes tests shipped to its labs from all over the country. Pushing back against a narrative that’s developed, Cohen also said that no, definitively no, running daily tests for the NBA was not placing stress on his lab’s capacity to test for the general public.
“Let me be clear, no,” Cohen said. “Our current capacity is somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 to 70,000 tests a day. So the amount of testing we’re doing for the sports franchises is minimal compared to our total number of testing. Secondly, we have continued to increase the amount of testing not just nationally, but specifically in the state of Florida. So I have hospitals, urgent care, physicians, all of these other clients in Florida, and not only did we bring more equipment to the lab in Florida, but we devoted more resources. I will tell you in the last two weeks, we’re doing more testing in Florida than we did two weeks beforehand. Hospitals, urgent care, all of that has increased, and we’ve done it without missing a beat.”
The NBA was greatly concerned about this notion at the start of the pandemic. The optics of the Utah Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder procuring tests on March 11, when it was learned Rudy Gobert tested positive, while testing was largely unavailable to the public, stuck in the minds of commissioner Adam Silver and his colleagues as they considered how and when to resume the season.
As months passed and the calendar turned to June, testing capacity increased in states across the U.S., lessening the obvious political and potentially moral dilemmas facing the league. Also in that time, decisions were made by elected leadership at all levels of government about how much to spend on testing, and how much precaution should be taken to re-open the economy with the virus still prevalent. The public at-large made those same choices, choosing whether or not it was still necessary to keep physical distance from non-family members and wear masks in public.
The NBA created and began to implement its plan before the virus answered those questions with massive outbreaks here in Florida, and in Texas, and Arizona and California.
“If we’d follow the guidelines that’s been there the last three months, then our country wouldn’t be in the shape that we’re in,” D’Antoni said. “I feel good about what I do personally, but also what the NBA’s doing and what other players are doing on their own. They’re very careful, everybody’s mindful and we want to have the best start up that we could possibly have with always a little risk. Everybody knows that.”
Yes. Everybody here knows they’re just a phone call away from bad news.
Day ✌️ of The Bubble Diaries … and @joevardon has already forgotten what day it is. 😂
☑️ Temperature checks
☑️ Sprints from the hotel door to the bathroomTap in for an inside look at the #NBABubble ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/lXrXPypMGo
— The Athletic NBA (@TheAthleticNBA) July 14, 2020
(Top photo: The NBA’s tools for health monitoring at Disney world, Joe Vardon, The Athletic )
