The NFL’s weekend COVID-19 testing scare wasn’t just a false alarm. It was a clear anomaly compared to the league’s low recent rate of positive tests.
NFL chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills said on a conference call Monday that between Aug. 12-20, the league conducted 58,397 total daily COVID-19 tests on 8,573 players and personnel and found zero positive tests among players and only six new positives among personnel.
That’s zero positives among 23,260 tests administered to players and only six new positives in the 35,137 conducted on personnel. The number of players still on the NFL’s COVID-19/reserve list is also down to single digits.
“I think our protocols are working,” Sills said. “I think we have shown that they are [yielding] the results that we want, and the events of this weekend should not change that view.”
Sills was defending the work of the NFL and its 32 franchises on the heels of Saturday’s 77 positive tests across 11 teams that all turned out to be false positives, coming from the same laboratory in New Jersey.
A great deal of work has been done by league and players’ union personnel, and teams’ coaches, players and staff to create and follow strict protocols with the common goal of completing the 2020 season safely.
They do not want this lab scare to undercut the encouraging results of those efforts to date.
“To me, the most important thing is that we’ve gotten through four weeks thus far without any of our clubs having a major outbreak,” Sills said. “Certainly it’s far too early to celebrate that. But I do think we should acknowledge our clubs have done a terrific job — players, coaches, staff — at following our protocols.”
BioReference Laboratories now is “pretty sure” the contamination happened in the transfer of some tests into an analyzing machine during the “pre-analytical stage,” which occurs under a “biological safety hood,” according to Patti Walton, the director of laboratory services and occupational health at Williamson Medical Center (Tenn).
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Staff were ruled out as the possible cause, according to BioReference executive chairman Dr. Jon R. Cohen.
“The transfer can be from the person that’s working under the hood. It [also] could be from their hand, their glove,” said Walton, one of the independent medical advisors lending her expertise to the NFL. “It could be from the base of the hood or the side of the hood.”
Cohen called the rash of false positives “an isolated contamination,” an important distinction since BioReference also handles COVID-19 testing for the NBA and Major League Soccer. The company has five different labs in the United States servicing the NFL.
He also said “subsequent testing has indicated that the issue has been resolved. All individuals impacted have been confirmed negative and informed.”
Indeed, all 77 individuals underwent subsequent point of care tests that came back negative, and then the 77 original positive samples were re-tested and came up negative, as well, according to sources.
The NFL Players’ Association still sent an email to its members assuring that an investigation will continue to ensure all protocols were and are being followed.
What Saturday and Sunday amounted to, then, was a dry run for the NFL and its teams to prepare for a potentially similar impediment in the fall, if not a true outbreak.
The Jets had 10 positive tests that forced them to postpone a Saturday night walkthrough, though they were later confirmed as false. The Vikings had eight players, one coach and three staffers test positive and had to change their practice plan with their smaller roster while awaiting word of false positives. The Browns closed their facility temporarily until they were able to contain the situation.
The Giants had two staffers who tested positive that were later confirmed false. The Giants’ staffers were not coaches or players, and they practiced normally Saturday and Sunday with no one absent.
The Giants also said two other individuals were placed in an isolated protocol after contact tracing deemed them to have been in close contact with the individuals in question for more than 15 minutes. Those two staffers checked out as negative eventually, as well.
“Both staffers are back at work today,” the Giants said Monday of the original positive tests. “After the positive result, both were given a point of care test [Sunday] morning [the results of which were known within the hour], and then both were also administered the standard PCR test that they undergo on a daily basis [the results of which were known late Sunday night]. Both test results for each of the staffers were negative. The tests were drive-by tests in front of our testing trailer at MetLife. Neither staffer entered the trailer to be tested and the two isolated at home until the results of their PCR tests were known.”
“In addition,” the Giants’ statement continued, “two other staffers were deemed through contact tracing to have been in close contact [closer than six feet] for more than 15 minutes with the false positive staff members. Both of the close contact staffers were administered their daily PCR test [Sunday] morning and isolated until their results were known late [Sunday] night. Both those tests were negative, and the two close contact staffers are also back at work [Monday] morning.”
Giants head coach Joe Judge admitted “we were pretty fortunate” in the grand scheme of Saturday’s situation, with no one truly testing positive and all players able to practice Sunday. He attributed that to how diligent the Giants have been in following protocol.
“I would just say we have confidence in what we’re doing,” Judge said. “We’re focused on the protocols. We come in every day, we test, we socially distance, we wear our PPE, we come in and practice hard, we make sure we’re washing our hands, not touching our face. To this point it’s been effective for us as a team. As far as the details that the league’s dealing with, I’ll let them hash that out, they’re the ones with all the information.”
As Judge alludes to, the frustrating part of this for teams is that they have successfully held up their end of the bargain, but they cannot control the type of mistake that occurred at this New Jersey lab that could throw an NFL Sunday into chaos.
“Those would be decisions I’ll let be handled by the people who make those decisions,” Judge said when asked if he’d lost faith in the process to protect games this fall from just such an outcome. “Our job is to show up to work every day. We test because we’re required to. We emphasize staying safe with our team, and the guys have been very receptive to that to this point.”
Sills said the NFL is continuing to evaluate all options on how frequently and efficiently it can test players leading into fall game days to try and prevent any major compromise.
It isn’t as simple as using the rapid-result point of care tests, however, Sills said. While they return results faster, stats show they are not as accurate as the PCR tests teams have been using to test players and personnel daily. There are also variables that would prevent the NFL using point of care tests on the kind of large scale they require, Sills said.
The NFL continues to monitor the developments of a COVID-19 saliva test developed at Yale University, and funded by the NBA and its players’ association, to determine if it will be accurate and efficient enough to incorporate.
There is also a chance the NFL and NFL Players’ Association could extend their daily testing protocol into the regular season. They’d originally agreed to test daily for two weeks and then move to every other day, but then they agreed to extend it to daily through Sept. 5.
The pre-Aug. 12 testing results were encouraging, similar to the results since then.
The NFL’s “intake testing,” or the testing done on all player and personnel as a precondition to entering training camp, included 9,983 total players and personnel tested (2,840 were players). That yielded 170 total positive tests (1.7%), including 53 positive player tests (1.9%).
Through Aug. 11, the NFL had conducted 109,075 total tests among players and personnel, including intake testing, and the positive rate had dropped to 0.46% of the entire group and 0.81% of players.
The overall positivity rate has not exceeded 1.7% for any single club since testing began. And as Sills said Monday, the NFL’s most recent numbers show all 32 teams are doing their part.
They do not want a laboratory error to overshadow those efforts. They did learn an important lesson here, however, that not only can it overshadow them; if this happens in the fall, it could render those efforts temporarily moot.
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