Just as the NFL sailed with a mild summer at the helm of COVID-19, suggesting it could be fully stocked to carry out its plan for a full season amid a pandemic, came On Sunday.
The news came with the urgency of the effects of the police station’s reports on election night: the Browns, then the Bears. The Steelers and Vikings. Jets and bills. Patriots. The Lions.
The good news is that the effects have been fixed in two words: false positives.
There have been no NFL outbreaks. At least not yet. The chimney alarm went off because of a false alarm.
However, the control of the truth for the NFL, with the initial diagnosis of dozens of COVID-19 tests indicating negative positive cases, has come to illustrate how temporarily the league and NFL player union can yield with a system failure.
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The fact that the multitude of obvious false positives can be attributed to a single BioReference lab in New Jersey is the clue. The league uses about a dozen labs to test all 32 teams, and none of the other labs reported dramatic spikes.
In a statement, the NFL said it is running with BioReference to launch an immediate investigation. Meanwhile, affected groups have entered emergency reaction mode as defined in league protocols.
Since the opening of the camps, the league has conducted around 150,000 tests on players, coaches and staff, with such an overwhelming amount of negative effects that the number of players from across the league included in the COVID-19 reserve list has been reduced to a figure. . Training
But do you believe if the eruption of false positives over the weekend occurred 3 Sundays later, like September 13, on week 1 Sunday?
Chaos. That’s what you can imagine.
No, with NFL COVID protocols and process reliability, games can be won or lost, postponed, or canceled in the lab.
The weekend drama did not cause camp education to clear, even though Cleveland was in limbo and a few dozen players from the groups involved were unable to train. According to COVID-19 protocols, if a player’s positive verification is presumed to be false, it may return after two negative checks. Many of the players who sat down on Sunday were expected to return to the paintings on Monday.
Somehow, Matthew Stafford might shrink. Earlier this month, the Lions quarterback went through a false positive that, under pressure, wanted to review the protocols to load layers of load to check positives on others who had no symptoms of the new coronavirus.
A few days after Stafford’s episode, the league required two confirmation checks for positive cases within 24 hours, adding a point-of-service check to analyze on the site.
By the time the revised protocols were announced, Allen Sills, the NFL’s leading adviser, posed the challenge.
“We will be more informed about the evidence,” Sills said in a call to the convention.
Sills warned that each new positive result does not amount to a new CASE of COVID-19. In some cases, for example, an individual may simply be a “persistent positive,” someone who has recovered from the coronavirus, but who still shows lines of the virus up to six months later.
There is no indication at this level that the eruption of positive tests over the weekend has any of the connection factors, such as past exposure to COVID-19.
However, the weekend drama actually shows the merits of daily testing, anything the players’ union insisted on after the NFL first looked for a limited window for daily testing. It is also transparent that confirmation tests had to be added to the protocol.
The purpose of the tests, of course, is to trip over the COVID-19 case and involve the damage by isolating the inflamed individual and minimizing spread.
Capturing fake instances is also a challenge, with other potential damage.
The Bills practiced Sunday without quarterback Josh Allen, the alleged victim of a verification result. Quick changes were used. Practice has happened.
Bill general manager Brandon Beane called it a “good chimney exercise.”
In words, major now than in September.