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There are outbreaks affecting all of the major sports leagues.

Yep.

Jalen, what do you think is going to happen next?

I think we should still stay safe.

But it's clearly going to have an effect on who wins it all or not.

Yeah.

That's our own Jalen and Jacoby, doing what so many of us are doing with our friends right now,

talking about how COVID is, once again, changing everything.

So today, with the Omicron variant ripping through America and pro sports scrambling to adjust,

we consult two experts, ESPN, Stefania Bell, and Harvard University's Dr. Joseph Allen,

who explain how leagues are changing in response to these outbreaks, and what that means for the rest of us.

I'm Pablo Torre. It's Monday, December 20th. This is ESPN Daily.

So, Stefania Bell, I don't know if you can remember this, but when we first called you up to talk COVID protocols, it was August of 2020. The NBA was in its bubble. The NFL was ironing out its first COVID protocols ever.

You were surrounded by enormous binders of printed out COVID rules and regulations. So how is it

all looking where you are right now on a Sunday afternoon 16 months later? Well, I'm surrounded

by a bunch of moving boxes now. And within those moving boxes are the

first stage of the binders. And now I actually have to create new binders for everything that's

happened since we last talked about all this. Yes, it is chaos in your home. It is structural change

in your home, all of which these leagues can relate to,

Stefania, because how would you characterize even the situation in sports and COVID right now?

...