Report: MLB Players, Team Employees to Partake in COVID-19 Study

The study could potentially offer researchers more information regarding the spread of the disease in the United States.

MLB players and team employees are participating in a large-scale COVID-19 study run by Stanford University, USC and the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory that will test up to 10,000 people for coronavirus antibodies and could potentially offer researchers more information regarding the spread of the disease, according to ESPN's Jeff Passan. 

Per ESPN, the study will employ test kits that draw blood via pinprick and offer results within 10 minutes. A positive test would confirm if a person did in fact contract the coronavirus. 

Doctors running the study told ESPN that the speed in which MLB ensured participation from people throughout the sport made it "the right choice for the study." The study, doctors note, is not expected to impact the timeline of the sport's potential return.

"This is the first study of national scope where we're going to get a read on a large number of communities throughout the United States to understand how extensive the spread of the virus has been," Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, told ESPN. "This will be the very first of those. Why MLB versus other employers? I've reached out to others, but MLB moved by far the fastest. They've been enormously cooperative and flexible. 

"This is going to be unbelievable for public health policy, and sport is giving back. Baseball gets nothing out of this other than to test drive public health policy," Dr. Daniel Eichner, the president of SMRTL, told ESPN. 

Amid the global health crisis, sports leagues are wrestling with potential plans to deal with the pandemic. Sports Illustrated's Stephanie Apstein noted last week, that "according to the experts—medical experts, not the money-making experts in league offices—we will not have sports any time soon."

"We will not have sporting events with fans until we have a vaccine," Zach Binney, a PhD in epidemiology who wrote his dissertation on injuries in the NFL and now teaches at Emory, told  Sports Illustrated. 

On March 30, Johnson & Johnson announced its experimental coronavirus vaccine could be used for human testing by September—and possibly approved under emergency authorization by early 2021. Other health experts believe a 12-to-18 month timeline may be too optimistic.

Among other proposals to resume gameplay specifically discussed by MLB, the league is reportedly eyeing a potential plan that would put all 30 teams in the Phoenix area and include playing games in empty ballparks.

As of Tuesday evening, there have been more than 1.9 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus worldwide, causing at least 124,000 deaths. There are nearly 600,000 confirmed cases in the United States.