written by Ben Cohen, Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2020
One day in 1891, at a school in Springfield, Mass., the discussion in a psychology seminar turned to something timely: The students were going crazy without sports.
The boys at this school had football in the fall, baseball in the spring and nothing when they couldn’t be outside in winter. This was a problem for the faculty of the International YMCA Training School. They decided their only solution was to invent an entirely new sport. It had to be interesting and simple to learn, but the most important thing about this game was that it had to be easy to play while stuck inside.
The young teacher given the seemingly impossible task of creating a game from scratch was named James Naismith. He called his sport basketball.
Now, more than a century after Naismith hammered a couple of peach buckets to a wall and more than two months after the shutdown of the NBA, his game is suddenly imperiled for the very same reason it exists: because it’s played indoors.
“Basketball is one of these sports where you’re right on top of each other, face to face, and there’s no way around it,” said Joe Allen, a Harvard University assistant professor of exposure assessment science. “It’s hard to get away from breathing in someone’s face.”
A basketball court is more like a crowded bar than a socially distanced baseball field—and that makes each game a potential breeding ground for disease. The basics of the sport have never looked so risky. There is physical contact on every play. The ball is touched so many times by so many hands that it might as well be a doorknob. The best teams are in constant vocal communication as they talk with each other, talk trash at opponents and talk down to referees. From high-fives to Stephen Curry’s dangling mouthguard, almost everything about basketball now feels menacing.
In fact, if you were trying to design a sport to spread a highly contagious respiratory illness, you would probably come up with an idea like Naismith’s ingenious way of entertaining his restless students.
The original purpose of basketball is precisely what makes it so difficult to play safely today. For example, when a team of Chinese researchers studied transmission of this coronavirus between Jan. 4 and Feb. 11, they identified 318 outbreaks with three or more cases, according to a report they posted to the preprint server medRxiv. Their most remarkable finding was how many of those 318 outbreaks were traced to outdoor environments: none. Every single one was the result of being inside.
“We hope that in the post-pandemic future,” they wrote, “mankind will reflect deeply on the need for a healthy indoor environment.”
But how to create a healthy indoor environment for basketball is not just an issue for the NBA teams currently evaluating their HVAC systems. This is a question that has to be answered for every pickup game in every gym around the world.
Dan Costa is an unlikely expert on this particular matter. He’s the retired national program director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Climate & Energy Research Program. He’s also a longtime basketball referee.
He sees basketball players wipe sweat from their faces and touch their mouths and noses. He watches enough saliva fly out from the opening of his whistle that he disinfects it with alcohol. And the first thing he does after every game is head straight to the restroom to wash his hands.
“There’s plenty of opportunity for happy little viruses to float around,” Costa said.
To understand the peculiar risks of playing basketball—more than a dozen NBA players and team employees tested positive for the virus before the league stopped disclosing test results—it helps to study others who behave in oddly similar ways. Those people include Chinese restaurant patrons, Korean fitness dancers and Washington state choir singers.
The night before the NBA season was suspended, a choir in Skagit County, Wash., held its weekly practice. There were 61 members in attendance—mostly women, mostly elderly. They sang for 40 minutes, split into smaller groups for the next 50 minutes, spent a 15-minute break mingling over cookies and oranges, then reconvened in the larger group for the last 45 minutes. They were together for about as long as it takes to play an NBA game.
One of those choir singers had come to practice that night feeling sick with cold-like symptoms. It wasn’t a cold. It turned out to be the pandemic strain of coronavirus.
The virus then ripped through this vulnerable population. In a choir of 61 people, there were 32 confirmed and 20 probable cases of Covid-19, including three hospitalizations and two deaths, according to a report published last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers behind that study believe that transmission was likely facilitated by the close quarters and exacerbated by something joyful that became devastating: singing.
But it isn’t only singing indoors that comes with a heightened risk of transmitting a lethal virus. It might be any sort of talking.
When a team of National Institutes of Health researchers studied the speech droplets of asymptomatic carriers of this virus, they found that droplets can remain suspended in undiluted air for longer than 10 minutes, according to a report they published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s a troubling development for basketball. It suggests that even normal speech is enough to result in airborne transmission in a closed environment.
That study was the latest addition to the scientific literature that shows the obstacles the NBA faces in bringing fans back to arenas and casual basketball players will have getting back to gyms.
There have also been CDC papers that examined transmission patterns among employees on the same floor of a Korean call center, women in Korean fitness dance classes and families eating in an air-conditioned Chinese restaurant. They all found evidence that being in crowded indoor settings for long periods of time could be exceptionally risky. Allen says it will be imperative that gyms make the indoors feel more like the outdoors by introducing fresh air and filtering circulated air. “We have to have the buildings start working for us,” he said.
The fantastic irony of this predicament is that spending time with people inside was the whole point of Naismith’s sport. And his brilliant epiphany was such a breakthrough that he quite literally snapped his fingers at his desk and shouted: “I’ve got it!”
But when he reflected many years later on that moment, knowing all the unexpected twists that he would encounter along the way, Naismith couldn’t help but feel a different emotion.
“On looking back,” he wrote, “it was hard to see why I was so elated.”