ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The COVID-19 outbreak among the Yankees’ coaching and support staff has infiltrated the clubhouse.
To what extent cannot yet be determined.
Gleyber Torres, held out of Wednesday night’s game against the Rays, in manager Aaron Boone’s words, out “of an abundance of caution,” has tested positive for the virus, the team announced Thursday afternoon.
That makes a total of eight members of the Yankees’ traveling party, but the first player, that have tested positive this week.
Boone disclosed before Wednesday night’s 1-0 victory over the Rays that four more members of the group — all coaches or support staff — had tested positive to go along with the three members the club said Tuesday were positive.
Pitching coach Matt Blake, third-base coach Phil Nevin and first-base coach Reggie Willits are the members of the field staff with positive results. The team has not released the names of the other club personnel testing positive.
Six of the seven coaches and support staff, Boone said Wednesday, were “asymptomatic.” All are fully vaccinated, with each getting the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot.
The Yankees weeks ago reached the required 85% threshold for vaccinations on the club — players, coaches, staff, etc. — that allowed them to relax some of the COVID-19 protocols implemented by Major League Baseball. Among those are mask wearing and social distancing.
Torres, who actually had COVID-19 in December and is fully vaccinated, is the first known Yankees player to have tested positive during the current outbreak on the club.
The 24-year-old, who played in Tuesday’s series opener, did not play Wednesday as he was awaiting word from the Joint COVID-19 Health and Safety Committee, comprising one MLB and one MLBPA representative and two physicians, to rule on his status.
“Gleyber is out of the lineup tonight and, essentially, the joint committee is waiting, because we’ve had so many tests done, waiting on some test results to still come back,” Boone said before Wednesday night’s game. “With all that’s going on with our team, out of an abundance of caution, we’re holding him out tonight. I know everyone’s going to read into that, but hopefully it’s nothing.”
It turned out to be something more than that, as has been the case when it comes to COVID-19 throughout the week, a successful one from the Yankees’ standpoint on the field as they took the first two games of this series against the Rays, but also a stressful one.
“Hectic,” Boone said on Wednesday in describing the situation, which the CDC has said is not unheard of.
According to the CDC, “a small percentage” of those who have been “fully vaccinated will still get COVID-19 if they are exposed to the virus that causes it.”
“These are called ‘vaccine breakthrough cases,’ ” the CDC states on its website. “This means that while people who have been vaccinated are much less likely to get sick, it may still happen. Experts continue to study how common these cases are. Large-scale clinical studies found that COVID-19 vaccination prevented most people from getting COVID-19.”
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky was asked about the Yankees’ situation during a briefing at the White House Thursday.
“With regard to the Yankees, we obviously need to learn more about that situation,” Walensky said. “My understanding is that six of the seven infections were indeed asymptomatic infections and we will look to more data from that report to understand what happened there. All of the real world data we’ve seen that’s been in the published literature, large studies, in many different settings, have demonstrated that those vaccines have a high effectiveness against disease.”
