Over the past few months, there have been many major steps towards finally defeating the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the biggest efforts in reaching this goal has been to get as many people in the U.S. vaccinated against the virus as possible. Sports teams definitely have not been excluded from that effort. Organizations are trying to get their players and staff vaccinated as soon as possible so that they can start to relax the restrictions that have been put in place for teams in the attempt to minimize the spread of the virus.
Despite this effort, The New York Yankees found themselves facing a Covid-19 outbreak at the start of last week. Reports of positive Covid-19 tests were released as the Yankees were preparing to begin a 3 game series with the Tampa Bay Rays. Before Tuesday night’s game, there had been 5 members of the Yankees staff that tested positive. Over the past week that number has grown to 9.
Three of the people that tested positive are part of the Yankees coaching staff. These coaches were Reggie Willits, who is the team’s first base coach, third base coach Phil Nevin, and pitching coach Matt Blake. Nevin was the only one out of the three to show any symptoms, however, all three coaches have remained in quarantine in Tampa Bay since the positive tests were announced.
Five of the other positive tests came from traveling and support staff members. None of the names were released for these individuals. On the bright side of things, none of these 5 staff members showed any symptoms.
The ninth individual to test positive was the Yankees shortstop Gleyber Torres. Prior to this positive test, Torres had already been fully vaccinated and had already undergone a spell of Covid-19 before the start of this season. He also showed no symptoms, meaning that only 1 out of 9 people who tested positive experienced any symptoms from the virus. Due to his positive test, Torres has been placed on the 10-day injured list and is waiting to receive two consecutive negative tests, which are required for him to rejoin the team.
All nine of these individuals had been vaccinated with the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The situation has prompted the CDC to look deeper into the matter.
During the press conference from the Covid-19 response team last Thursday, CDC director, Dr. Walensky, addressed the issue saying, “With regard to the Yankees, we obviously need to learn more about that situation. My understanding is that six of the seven reports, six of the seven infections were indeed asymptomatic infections. And we will look to more data from that report to understand what happened there. All of the real world data we’ve seen that’s been in the published literature, large studies, in many different settings, have demonstrated that those vaccines are effective, have a high effectiveness against disease.”
There are estimations as to what might have caused the breakthrough infections, one of the most prominent being that one of the circling variants could be to blame. Another theory is that it could purely be because of the fact that the vaccines are not perfect and that it is just a natural breakthrough situation. However, nothing has been proved just yet, so we must wait for updates before coming to any conclusions.
Major League Baseball and the New York State Department of health are working with the Yankees to investigate the issue further. This is a situation that could definitely have more major updates to follow, so keep an eye out for more information from us here at Blind Boys Politics.
