You’ve got 30 healthy players total in each dugout and bullpen (with expanded rosters), with seven coaches.  Maybe you have two trainers and a batboy.  Plus four umpires, and maybe a bullpen catcher for each team.

So in a Major League Baseball game, you have 90 people (give or take) on the field at a game.

In Philadelphia yesterday, eight players and two coaches from one team, the Miami Marlins, tested positive on Sunday–three before the game.  That’s roughly 12% of the people on the field for the game who had or got coronavirus on one day.

Major League Baseball started the season in a bubble, with constant testing, limited contact with the outside world, and a world class medical staff.

Now replace the word “players” with “students.”  Make “coaches” into “teachers,” and “umpires” into “staff.”

Finally, multiple that number of people on the field by nine, and you’ll have roughly the median population of a high school in the United States.

The median size of a high school is 750 students.  America’s 130,000 schools have an average of 25 teachers each.

After one three-game series between the Marlins and the Phillies, 12% of the people on the field tested positive.  More likely will test positive on both those teams, as well as the teams the Marlins played immediately prior to the start of the season.  Not to mention team clubhouse staff and administrators.

If Major League Baseball, with all its money and all its resources, can’t guarantee the safety of the teams, when they employ just 900 players, how can America’s schools, with schools nine times as crowded, 50 million total students, 3.2 million full-time teachers, and exhausted budgets, even think they can start in-person classes and keep people safe?