When I was a kid I dreamed of someday appearing in the pages of @SInow Sports Illustrated.

It took longer than I hoped, and I'm not there for the reasons I dreamed of, but I finally made it, albeit as commentator rather than subject. https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/04/10/sports-arent-coming-back-soon

For this story I talked with @StephApstein about what it would take to rescue the @MLB season this pandemic year. I was relatively pessimistic in that conversation and in the article—but I've been thinking about it for the past two days and am feeling more optimistic now.

For me it all comes down to testing. Can you test every player every day? Seems feasible, actually. What does the transmissibility curve compare to the detectability over the course of infection? This is critical and could even obviate the need for a strong firedome.

Come for the story about reopening sports, and stay for @zbinney_NFLinj's stark description of why we *have* to stop this pandemic somehow, rather than letting it rip through the population until herd immunity is reached.

I'm getting intense blowback for even suggesting the idea of testing.

I've thought about this a fair bit, and obviously it's ethically untenable (as well as a PR disaster) for the @MLB to take tests away from people who need them.

Obviously I could be wrong in my expectations, but I still think it IS a potential solution, because I think if we invest now we can be testing at least ten million of Americans *per day* within a couple of months. Anyone with symptoms, plus frequent screening for frontline folk.

First, note that you can screen every player every day without using a test on every player every day. Because positives will be rare inside a firedome, batch testing is fine. Combine samples (e.g. all players on one team) and test that. If positive, test individually.

So the numbers we are talking are more like 50 tests a day, not 1500-2000.

Second, even now testing shortages are about logistics more than equipment. Recently (and I think still?) @UWVirology has been running thousands of tests a day under capacity because of delivery issues.

Third, there's nothing technologically difficult about the tests we are doing now. Now that we've designed good primers, this is straightforward RT-PCR that you could do in any university research lab. An excellent explainer from @Anna_Minkin: https://elemental.medium.com/the-science-behind-coronavirus-testing-and-where-the-u-s-went-wrong-7920c3fb5049

Fourth, there are all kinds of cool technology that are already established in a research setting. Iso-theremal amplification is fast and promising: https://www.neb.com/applications/dna-amplification-pcr-and-qpcr/isothermal-amplification

Multiplex RT-PCR with barcoding can allow you to do huge numbers of samples in parallel, and then pull out the specific identities of the positive cases. https://www.illumina.com/science/technology/next-generation-sequencing/plan-experiments/multiplex-sequencing.html

Fifth, I've been advocating all along that this has to be done in a way that increases, not decreases local and national capacity. @MLB either has to wait until tests are ubiquitous, or has to invest significantly in testing development.

. @MLB should deploy sufficient excess testing capacity to provide extensive gratis testing within the community, e.g. of first responders, police, etc. on the equipment they use for testing players.

tl;dr — I think it would be great to get baseball going in 6-8 weeks, provided it can be done without taking tests away from other people who need them. If it can't, don't do it. But I think it can.