In a televised interview with Malika Andrews on Tuesday, Adam Silver said the NBA has no plans to suspend its season in the face of a significant COVID-19 surge among players and staff.

"No plans right now to pause the season," Silver said in an interview on NBA Today on Tuesday afternoon. "We have of course looked at all the options, but frankly we are having trouble coming up with what the logic would be behind pausing right now.

"As we look through these cases literally ripping through the country, let alone the rest of the world, I think we're finding ourselves where we sort of knew we were going to get to over the past several months, and that is this virus will not be eradicated, and we're going to have to learn to live with it. I think that's what we're experiencing in the league right now."

The NBA has postponed seven games over the past week.

"We're up around probably 90% of the positive cases we're seeing right now are omicron," Silver said.

Silver also said the NBA is paying attention to how other leagues are handling positive cases.

"We have a lot of data we look at. In terms of players and coaches that have gone through the three-shot protocol, meaning the two mRNA shots and then the booster, and then past two weeks, only a very small number of those people have been breakthrough cases where they've turned positive," Silver said. "And they essentially have been asymptomatic or very mild symptoms. We're also dealing with a large group that either have one J&J shot or haven't been boosted yet.

"I would just say to our community, really to everyone, at least based on the data the NBA has, that the boosters are highly effective, and we are strongly encouraging everyone to get them. In fact, in our league right now, we're around 97% vaccinated, but we're up to about 65% of our players have been boosted and we're in active discussions with the players' association to get that number even higher. So we're not, in terms of your question, in essence whether we can treat this as endemic, and people begin to move on and we only test those that are symptomatic and deal with those, we're not quite there yet, but we're paying a lot of attention to what other leagues are doing."