10,000 MLB Players and Families Are Part of Nationwide COVID-19 Study

Ten thousand employees and their relatives from 27 of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams will participate in a study looking for COVID-19 antibodies, the league confirmed Tuesday. From players to stadium workers to administrative staff to executives, the volunteers participating in the study will come from all levels of the organizations taking part in the study.

Being conducted by the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory (SMRTL), Stanford University and the University of Southern California, the COVID-19 Sero Prevalence Study will try to discover how widespread the virus is among people in major metropolitan areas across the United States.

“We’ve got all the way from team owner all the way down to hot dog sales, and everything in between,” SMRTL president Dr. Daniel Eichner told CNN. “That’s really important for us is that we get a wide spread of the general population when we do this study.”

Researchers will be using a pin-prick test to detect an antibody the body creates in response to the infection, not an active COVID-19 infection. The test is not the same one doctors are administering (when available) to determine if people are currently infected with the virus.

The COVID-19 Sero Prevalence Study will be the first, and largest, nationwide study on coronavirus antibody testing.

“This kind of study would have taken years to organize outside of this setting,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor who is leading the study, told The New York Times. “With the help of MLB, we’ve managed to do this in a matter of weeks.”

The cost of the study is being paid by donors, not Major League Baseball, and the league did not pay to participate.

“This is going to be unbelievable for public health policy, and the sport is giving back,” Eichner told ESPN. “Baseball gets nothing out of this other than to test-drive public health policy.” And, if baseball’s season finally has its Opening Day a little sooner because of the study, all the better.

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