New clouds, notably Florida's pandemic problems, over announced NBA re-start

Florida’s Virus Spike Gives N.B.A. Players One More Reason to Hesitate, the New York Times columnist Marc Stein posted 6/22/20 and published yesterday:

Since Tuesday night, when the league began distributing a 113-page guide of health and safety protocols to govern its planned restart of the 2019-20 season at Walt Disney World next month, the rate of confirmed coronavirus cases in Orange County, Fla., has risen dramatically.

Meanwhile, some players have announced they won't play, concerned about the pandemic. Others, note Stein, are concerned about diverting "momentum from the Black Lives Matter movement" or facing a higher risk of injuries, given the gap in practicing.

Yesterday, as ESPN reported, Lakers' Avery Bradley opts out of NBA restart, cites family concerns, given that one son "has a history of struggling to recover from respiratory illnesses, and it's unlikely that he would have been medically cleared to enter the Orlando bubble with his family."

A porous "bubble"

Even though the NBA promises strict protocols, the "bubble" will inevitably be porous by the time the season re-starts, announced at July 31.

Yesterday CBS's James Herbert reported, Florida's COVID-19 cases are surging, and that could ruin the NBA's Disney World bubble plan:

In a phone interview, Zach Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College of Emory University, called this combination of facts "really, really, worrying." He said the NBA hadn't done anything wrong, but "I'm afraid it's all about to go pear-shaped anyway." 

...The NBA has enough time to try to turn the mesh hat into a real bubble. It would be expensive and logistically difficult, but, even if things stay about as bad as they are rather than getting a lot worse, Binney said that housekeepers, food-service staff and bus drivers would need to be tested every other day "at the absolute minimum" in order to be confident that a reasonable percentage of cases would be caught. 

Today, the Times's Stein, in his newsletter, posted Prognostications Can Wait, suggesting it wasn't right to estimate basketball success upon the season re-start, given "so many big-picture complexities still looming over the league as it reboots operations."