What the NBA Bubble Can Teach Us

here's what happened in virus news today. Vizer said it could seek emergency use authorization for its COVID nineteen vaccine in the US as soon as late November. That's if the shot is shown to be effective in a large late stage trial. That timing squelches any notion that a vaccine could be cleared in the US before election day.

The timeline will be dictated by safety reviews, with the Food and Drug Administration requiring that at least half the study participants be watched for side effects for two months. That milestone should be achieved in the third week of November. According to an open letter published on the company's website today from viser chief Executive Officer Albert Boula. Residents in London and Paris are bracing for tighter curbs on social

activity starting tomorrow. Governments across Europe are attempting to get a new wave of coronavirus infections in check without crippling their economies. Cases are heading daily records around the region, and Britain and France are two of the worst affected nations. Londoners will be banned from mixing with other households indoors, while the residents of Paris and eight other major cities in France will be confined to their homes at night

for four weeks. Finally, a new study that has not yet been peer reviewed suggests the drug m desevie has no substantial effect on a patient's chances of survival. A clinical trial by the World Health Organization that studied rum desevere and several other anti viral treatments, including hydroxy chloroquine, opinevere and interferon, found that none substantially affected mortality reduced

the need for ventilators. According to the Financial Times, results also showed that the drugs had little effect on how long patients stayed in the hospital and now for today's main story. The Los Angeles Lakers took home the NBA championship this week, but the close of the season also marked a bigctory for the league itself. The NBA played its finals in a unique environment that came to be known as the Bubble. Players were frequently tested and social

distancing was heavily enforced, and the experiment worked. The NBA did not report a single positive coronavirus case from players or staff. I spoke to reporters am A. Court and Brandon catch cod In about what's next for the league and whether other organizations can replicate its success. The NBA kept teams on the Disney World grounds and used wearable technology like the Aora ring, which claims to detect early symptoms. They were also tested nearly every day using highly sensitive tests.

Have any other sports leagues used similar measures? Yeah? I think. I think there's been debates about whether the or ring

actually works in terms of determining the early onset. What was picked up on by other leagues though, UM, the NFL and UH the Southeastern Conference in college football were a similar technology called these connects on devices, and that was it was basically, UM, you know, a wearable contact tracing device, and so it would you know, it like lights up when people get within six ft of each other.

It keeps track of whether people are able to enter certain parts of a building or the stadium, and then obviously attracts who were you close by. So certain elements of this are found, um, like I said, in the NFL and in college football. But whether the or ring was able to actually detect early on set of symptoms, I think that's still up for debate and sort of questionable. And this is like the Holy Grail, right, We're talking about figuring out if people are sick, tracking people who

are sick using technology. This is something that would be really widely applicable if we can figure out that it works. And I think what's interesting about why you're seeing these groups being used to test out the technology is that other parts of society aren't being tested nearly as much. Right, we don't have this kind of data on on you know, less valuable athletes for instance, are regular people walking around in the US. Yeah, that's a great point. I'm with.

You know, this is one of the things the NBA has kind of consistently tried to put out there is that you know, in the wake of the controversy around should athletes testing be prioritized in this issue of you know, whether they're daily testing regiment was taking up you know, valuable laboratory capacity from the general public. Their argument has always been, we're in a sense of laboratory and we're you know, kind of not that they've used the term, but in a sense guinea pigs for some of these

technologies and strategies. And you know, we saw that with their they're teaming up with the Yale Laboratory around the saliva testing, which you know, the NBA has been very proud and sort of tout that advancement. I just wanted to piggyback off of that, which is a really good point, Brandon. And actually a new kind of coronavirus test was pioneered using the NBA. It's uh, you may have heard of it. It's affiliated with Yale as well. Um and this test

uses saliva to detect um COVID nineteen. And what's really interesting about it, and we've seen some other, um, you know, versions of this test being used at the University of Illinois at Champagne Urbana for instance, is that this test lets you kind of skip a step as you process the test, so it allows for much faster turnaround time. It's easy to collect, right you spit into a tube

UM and it's really quite cheap. And it also allows you to use different kinds of brands of testing equipment UM in your while processing it in the lab, so you don't need to be reliable on a single source for these chemicals called reagents for instance. It kind of hacks the traditional PCR test model and makes it a lot cheaper, easier to process, and you know, more accessible.

And so, you know, continuing on that topic, it does seem that with all this technology, all this kind of investment in testing, the NBA didn't report one single positive coronavirus case. I mean, what do you think what made the bubble so successful? I mean, if I think it's mostly that they had control of their environment, and you know they had the daily testing, but you know, people from Disney coming in, coming out, they were tested. You know,

the contact with other people was limited. The NBA took very seriously that when people left the bubble they had to go into Attende quarantine. So they were super strict about these things. And you know, they did something that everyday Americans can't do. And that's you know, totally control

the environment. And they had access to resources that, as you point out, many Americans don't have access to, you know, being able to quarantine before you go to work, for instance, or as you leave work and go into the community, Like that's pretty amazing. And um, I think also the access to testing is a big one. I mean, we've seen that overall picture change a lot. In the US, there's a lot better access to testing, especially if you're

symptomatic person. But you know, testing people, you know, as frequently as every other day, that's not something that's even close to the reality for most people in the United States. Most people in the United States maybe they've been tested once, if at all. And let's think about it also in terms of other sports leagues, you know, other sports other um safe professional college sports are having a real tough

time with preventing outbreaks, preventing positive cases. Is it possible for other leagues to create their own bubbles that are as successful as the NBA's has been. Well, we saw the NHL do a similar bubble. They just had it on across two cities in Edmonton and Toronto. So there's a parallel there. But with regard to things like baseball in the NFL, you know, there are disadvantages that the NBA didn't have, and and some of those are just you know, bigger roster sizes mean many more people that

you know would have to be included in a bubble. Um. Baseball plays sixty games. I mean, the the NBA and the NHL had an advantage where they were very close to their playoffs, so this wasn't something where they would have to play, you know, in the NFL's case, like a regular season of four or five months. Um. And the other thing is just you know, Disney took the

prime real estate here. I mean, you couldn't have hoped for anywhere better than than Disney, where you have all these hotels, you have the capacity to have the many people on site. Um. For someone like baseball, I mean, there's just no there was no equivalent place to go. I mean some of the early talk was about putting all these teams in Arizona. Well, they would have been playing the season in July and August in Arizona and

there's only one temperature controlled stadium there. So you know the idea of having a bunch of these uh, these games held when temperatures are a hundred hundred five ten degrees. Uh, you know, quickly sort of becomes inconceivable. And then with the NFL, I mean again, it's just the sheer size of these rosters and the idea of where are you going to find enough football fields? I mean, just just thinking about it in terms of the size of a

football field versus a basketball field. Um, there's just there's nowhere else that you could create a bubble like this, and there's really just not there's not another sport where where there's this many fields available. Has the NBA announced anything in terms of its plans for the next season, if it's going to go the bubble route or any other any other logistical plan. They haven't yet. And and they haven't even set when the start date for the

new season will be. It was initially expected like maybe it would be on Christmas Day, um, and now it's looking closer towards January. And a lot of this has to do with the fact is, you know, let's be serious here, the NBA lost a ton of money because of this. I mean, they lost all of the fans and attendance. They don't want to do this again. That this isn't something where this is a proof of concept and hey, you know, if we have to, we'll go back to it. There's a significant amount of money on

the line here. There was a significant cost of a hundred and fifty million was was what was reported for this, and you know, they don't want to play another season without fans, So the idea of doing a bubble again to me just seems like a non starter. So, as you both have mentioned, you know, this was a scenario that was fairly unique, fairly expensive, and not something that maybe a will to be replicated, either in another sport

or in general. But is there anything that we can take away from what we've seen in the NBA bubble? Is there something that the public can take away from how the NBA handled the virus, either when it comes to testing or the social distancing rules that they were enforcing. I think to start, it's quite hopeful to have an example of where things did go well, because we haven't.

We haven't had a whole lot of that lately. And um I note that the NBA bubble was conducted, you know, it started in the summer, and it was conducted in Florida, So we're talking about it happening also in a state that at the time was a real you know, becoming a real hot spot and so their success, you know, it really does say something that was Emma Cord and Brandon catch coded. And that's it for our show today.

For coverage of the out from one D and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a ragging on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Topha foreheads Jordan Gaspore, Magnus and Rickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Emma Court and Brandon Cotch Cooden. Original

music by Leo Sidran. Our editors are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.