Reacts: Fans are worried about Covid again

Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across the NBA. Each week, we send out questions to the most plugged-in LA Clippers fans across the country. Sign up here to join Reacts, and check out DraftKings Sportsbook, the official sportsbook partner of SB Nation.

For the first month of the season, you could almost forget that the NBA was playing in the middle of a pandemic, as Covid absences were few and far between, and the 97 percent vaccination rate among players — 100 percent on the Clippers — limited the severity of most protocols.

However, the holidays have provided a sobering reminder of what the league, and the general public, continues to deal with. Per reporting from Baxter Holmes of ESPN, 43 players have entered the protocol in the past two weeks, including 13 on Tuesday alone. To put that into context, only 17 players were in the health and safety protocols in the first six weeks of the 2021-22 season. Shams Charania of The Athletic also reported that the NBA has seen its first player case of the omicron variant.

Three teams have had at least five players in the protocol simultaneously, but only two games have been postponed thus far, when the Chicago Bulls found themselves down 10 players due to Covid. In the latest SB Nation reacts survey, 65 percent of fans responded that the NBA should be quicker to postpone games in response to positive tests.

The league and the players association are now in discussions to increase the frequency of testing, even for vaccinated players. The good news is that even as more players and team personnel are testing positive, many of the cases appear to be asymptomatic; so even as transmission increases, members of the league at least aren’t getting sick.

Do you think the NBA should be quicker to react to the spread of Covid in the league?

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