A driver who killed a 23-year-old pedestrian and injured four others in a blistering Gramercy Park crash drank all day before getting behind the wheel with a blood alcohol level nearly twice the legal limit, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Mahbub Ali was ordered held on $300,000 bail for the wild Sunday evening crash that sent pedestrians scrambling for cover and left victims scattered along the roadway.

Ali, 26, admitted he started drinking at brunch around noon Sunday — and never stopped, Assistant District Attorney Taylor Maurer said during Ali’s arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court.

After brunch, the Queens resident went to another location and kept on drinking, the prosecutor said.

Two hours after the 7:30 p.m. crash on Third Ave. near E. 21st St., Ali’s blood alcohol level was still .158.

“(He) admitted to going out drinking all day and to driving after,” Maurer said. “Because of (his) decision to drink and drive, there are now four individuals who suffered physical injury, two of whom needed surgery, and one 23-year-old man who is dead.”

Abdulhekim Esiyok, 23, was crossing Third Ave. near E. 21st St. when Ali slammed into him.

“I held his hand and he was gone,” said freelance journalist George Colli, who heard the crash and raced to the scene, finding the victim curled in a fetal position next to a crumpled metal trash can. “Me and another woman prayed over him. It gave me some kind of comfort.”

Colli recognized Esiyok from a local church group where he’s a volunteer. The Turkish immigrant was staying at a shelter near where he was struck, Colli said.

“He was a very hard worker,” said Colli. “He came here to work and send money to his family back home.”

Four others were hurt in the crash. Debris including broken bits of a bicycle was found scattered over half a block.

Zipping uptown on Third Ave., Ali’s Hyundai Sonata struck Esiyok in the marked crosswalk at E. 21st St., then swerved right and hit an 18-year-old man turning onto the avenue on his e-bike, police said.

Ali then mounted the sidewalk, his car’s right tires hitting two more pedestrians, a 21-year-old man and a 26-year-old woman, before slamming into a parked unoccupied NYPD van.

“I was just crossing the street when I heard a bang,” a nearby resident who identified himself as Robert told the Daily News Monday. “There was a scary sound, a lot of commotion, a lot of screaming. You knew right away something was wrong.”

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“You saw people on the ground triage kind of instantly and pieces of car mixed with bike strewn all over the ground,” he added.

Ali was caught on surveillance camera striking the NYPD vehicle, a garbage can and a light pole, according to court papers. A 25-year-old woman in the passenger seat of Ali’s car suffered a leg injury.

Esiyok was “thrown in the air for a significant distance” when Ali rammed into him, Maurer said.

Medics rushed all the victims to Bellevue Medical Center, where Esiyok died.

More than $6,000 has been raised on a GoFundMe post for Esiyok’s family.

Ali was standing outside his mangled car when he was taken into custody, cops said. It was his first arrest.

A call to Ali’s attorney was not immediately returned Tuesday.

The proclamation, which came via memo Thursday morning, occurred before three teams announced or had reported positive coronavirus tests inside their buildings.

Three members of the Philadelphia 76ers organization and one from the Denver Nuggets tested positive for the virus, the teams announced early Thursday. Late Thursday afternoon, the Lakers announced two players were infected with the coronavirus.

Shortly after that, the Boston Celtics announced one of their players had tested positive for virus. The player is asymptomatic and has been in isolation for several days. The Celtics said testing was initiated because of exposure to a known positive patient.

Celtics guard Marcus Smart later posted on Twitter that he had tested positive.

“I’m OK and I feel fine. I don’t feel any of the symptoms,” Smart said in a video. “But I can’t stress enough practice social distancing and really keeping yourself away from a large group of people — washing your hands and help protect yourself and help protect others by protecting yourself.”

Smart brings to 10 the number of NBA players infected. Utah’s Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell, Detroit’s Christian Wood and Brooklyn’s Kevin Durant, along with three of his Nets teammates, have also tested positive.

Neither Denver nor Philadelphia said if their positive tests were for players.

The 76ers said in a statement that they had “in consultation with medical experts and the NBA, received the recommendation that certain individuals from the organization, including players, coaches and specific basketball operations support staff, be tested for COVID-19. The tests were secured and processed privately.”

The Nuggets said the member of their organization who tested positive for the coronavirus had been experiencing symptoms.

The NHL, which shares arenas with NBA teams in Philadelphia, Boston, Denver and Los Angeles, said they still only have one positive case of the coronavirus — an unidentified player on the Ottawa Senators.

In a televised interview with ESPN’s Rachel Nichols on Wednesday, Commissioner Adam Silver said NBA players could be considered “super spreaders.”

“They are young people who are working in close proximity to each other,” Silver said. “They are traveling at great frequency. They are regularly in large groups, including the public, and for young, the young cohort in particular, large numbers of them are asymptomatic, and if they do have symptoms, they’re relatively mild.”

It’s why, in part, the NBA instructed teams to close their facilities.

Since the suspension of play on March 11, players have been allowed to work out in team practice facilities provided they do so individually with one other staff member, distanced from the rest of the players, coaches and staff.

But with positive tests mounting and social distancing normalizing, the NBA made the decision to close the doors to team facilities. Players are not allowed to work out in any non-NBA gyms, largely forcing them away from the game while the league and the country tries to slow the spread of the virus.

The rapid spread of the virus among NBA players was always a concern since the league first began wrestling with the pandemic. Without factoring in officials, who bounce between teams throughout the season, the NBA operates in a tight system.

You can connect all 30 teams to the Lakers with only four degrees of separation in the final week before the NBA called off games.

Within minutes of Gobert’s positive test being reported, the NBA suspended its season, helping trigger the same response of other pro and college sports leagues and conferences.

Asked Wednesday about the four Nets players who tested positive, Silver said he was expecting it.

“I honestly was not all that surprised,” he said. “I’d say that based on what we’re hearing and given the lack of testing that’s available, my sense is that, especially in the New York area, that if you took almost any random group of New Yorkers, that it’d be likely, increasingly likely, that there are gonna be some positive tests.”

Already, some leagues and teams are altering standard rituals in response to the pandemic. The Atlantic 10 Conference basketball tournaments have banned pre- and post-game handshakes among players. The N.B.A. recently circulated a memo urging players to use fist-bumps instead of high-fives with fans. The Portland Trail Blazers’s C. J. McCollum announced on Twitter that he was “officially taking a break from signing autographs.” (The Boston Celtics’ Kemba Walker told ESPN, “I’m pretty sure I’m still going to sign some autographs, but maybe I’ll just walk around with my own marker.”) Joe Baudo, the president of the New York State Amateur Hockey Association, which has a big tournament starting on Friday, told a local radio station that, after games, “the players will leave their gloves on and fist-bump each other as they go through the line, instead of taking gloves off and shaking hands.”

In Japan, baseball teams are playing pre-season games inside otherwise empty stadiums, the announcer’s voice echoing strangely as it bounces around the bare stands. (“It’s so quiet it’s almost uncomfortable to make a sound,” a correspondent for CNN said, reporting from a game a few days ago.) Several games in the top tier of the Italian soccer league have also been played behind closed doors; others were postponed. The world indoor track-and-field championships, scheduled for later this month, in Nanjing, China, has been pushed to next year. The Tokyo Marathon, normally one of the most popular in the world, was run, on Monday, only by élite runners and wheelchair athletes; spectators were urged to stay away. The Basketball Africa League, a new effort affiliated with both the N.B.A. and FIBA, has delayed the start of its inaugural season.

Many of us, most of the time, can take the risks of major sporting events for granted. Thousands of people convene, from distant places, and come into close contact with one another, touching common surfaces—bathroom faucets, turnstiles—and crowding together at points of entry and in food courts. In some stadiums, they jam into bleachers; in others, into stands. The National College Players Association, a college-athlete advocacy group, has urged the N.C.A.A. to consider holding events without spectators and to cancel public obligations, such as news conferences. Think of college basketball, and then picture Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium without the Crazies (a blessed vision to some, I realize). But stadiums aren’t the only, or even the primary, place where people congregate to watch sports. They go to friends’ houses and to watch parties and to bars. In 2010, epidemiologists secured a grant to study the spread of swine flu at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, only to find the situation was under control by the time the Games began; instead, they tracked a measles outbreak in British Columbia to two visitors to the Olympics. It appears that it spread through public, Olympics-related gatherings.

Wired described that story four years ago, in a piece titled “If You Want to Study Disease, the Olympics Are Where to Be.” Whether or not the International Olympic Committee will cancel or postpone this year’s Olympic Games, which are scheduled to begin on July 24th, in Tokyo, is probably the biggest coronavirus question in the sports world. Around eleven thousand athletes, from two hundred countries, and an estimated seven and a half million ticket holders are expected to descend on one of the areas most affected by the outbreak—and then to leave it, bringing with them whatever they’ve caught. In the best of times, as the Wired story makes plain, the Olympics—and particularly the close quarters of the athletes’ village, where athletes often bunk (and, not infrequently, share beds)—is a vector for viral transmissions. Researchers who studied the Finnish delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympics found that forty-five per cent of athletes and thirty-two per cent of staff reported symptoms of a respiratory infection over twenty-one days during and surrounding the Games; they also identified multiple strains of influenza, coronaviruses, and other viruses that manifested as the common cold.

The I.O.C. is adamant that the Games will go on, as they always have except in times of war. John Coates, the organization’s Tokyo event coördinator, told reporters, “There is no case for any contingency plans or cancelling the Games or moving the Games.” That may seem the height of hubris—or, perhaps, greed, considering the organization’s undistinguished record on ethics. But there is a lot at stake even beyond the billions in sponsorships and television money: many people orient their entire lives toward those two brief weeks.

The major sports leagues in the United States are taking a wait-and-see-approach, dutifully issuing statements about internal task forces and contacts with experts. Cancelling or altering games and events may become necessary—or not; the uncertainty surrounding the virus at the moment is part of its hold on the public imagination. But, already, large institutions across the world are temporarily shutting down. Schools are closed, and conferences have been called off. Suspending a sports tournament or even part of a season should be no different—and, yet, it seems, to me, somehow harder to imagine. Sports, for better and worse, play an outsized role in social cohesion. They distract and comfort even fans who may seem to have little, locally, to cheer for.

Perhaps that’s why my mind keeps returning to those moments when people touch one another. A basketball player backing his way into a defender, a defensive end sacking a quarterback, students hopping up and down together in the stands of an arena. I think of rough contests giving way to reconciliations; LeBron James hugging Zion Williamson. A tennis match, for me, isn’t over after match point; it ends when the players meet at the net and make physical contact for the first time since before the first serve. However genuine the show of respect is or isn’t, that gesture defines the game as a game, as opposed to pure conflict. It’s not the contact so much as what it symbolizes: how we want to treat one another. And the more that good, pro-social behavior involves keeping our distance, the more I find myself appreciating those spaces in which—and those moments when—that distance can be breached.