If it becomes impossible to play college football this fall, it will be blatantly obvious where to pin the blame. Like so many other issues this country has dealt with over the past four months during the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s inability to figure out how to test large numbers of people in an accurate and efficient manner is going to be the culprit.
The NCAA issued a new set of guidelines Thursday for the return of college sports, calling for “testing and results within 72 hours of competition” for a sport like football that is impossible to play without people coming into close contact with one another.
The recommendation is in line with a document being put together by the Power Five conferences, which Sports Illustrated obtained. It called for players to be tested once a week, along with other guidance about contact tracing and quarantining that would practically guarantee one case of COVID-19 would sideline a significant number of players who came into contact with the person who tested positive.
It’s a set of guidelines that, to be honest, does not lend a lot of hope to the idea that college football can be played in any recognizable manner this fall, if it can be played at all.
Testing just once a week prior to a game allows too many potential holes for the virus to work its way into a locker room or onto the playing field. And if close contact with a player who tests positive requires a 14-day mandatory quarantine, as SI reported, there are going to be a lot of roommates and perhaps entire position groups that would likely have to sit out, even if they are healthy.
"Once a week is always what I said was the minimum, but the 72-hour turnaround definitely leaves a window open for someone to become infectious before they get on the field,” said Zach Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College of Emory University.
“And if anybody who’s been in close contact with someone who tests positive is going to be quarantined for 14 days, that’s two games in college football, so I’d be really curious to see how practices are structured, how locker room time is structured and how well students behave when away from individual facilities and coaches. If they’re being honest about being within six feet of each other for 15 minutes, I could see the knocking out a large percentage of the team for one case.
“If your center tests positive and you’ve been practicing like you normally would, he’d have gotten more than 15 minutes of close contact with everyone on your offensive and defensive lines.”
The antidote to these guidelines, even with the inability for college football to build a bubble like the NBA or NHL, would be testing. Lots and lots of testing — better, easier testing — so that schools could figure out within the span of a couple hours whether any of their players were carrying COVID-19 onto the practice field on a given day.
When the pandemic arrived in earnest back in March, the hope and belief of many administrators in college sports was that advancements in testing would allow them by the fall to get quick, accurate results and test players multiple times per week. As the NCAA wrote in its guidelines Thursday, “there was an expectation that such a return (to sports) would take place within a context that assumed syndromic surveillance, national testing strategies and enhanced contact tracing.”
Instead, what we’re looking at is once-a-week testing in an environment where the trajectory of the virus in too many cities and states is still growing, creating backlogs because the country still has not created enough testing capacity. While some schools are able to get results turned around quickly because they have the medical facilities on campus to process the tests, others are having to send them to labs across state lines, meaning a 72-hour turnaround might not even be possible in a given week.
The fact that’s still an issue in this country, despite the knowledge back in March that college football’s return would be dependent on lots more testing, should be a national disgrace. President Donald Trump has often referenced wanting to see 100,000 people at Alabama-LSU this fall. So why hasn’t the full weight of the government been applied to help make it possible?
Instead, conferences, individual schools and the NCAA are left to reckon with the idea that seemingly healthy college football players would be using valuable testing resources so they could get on the field in an environment where people who need tests are still struggling to get results quickly.
“Today, sadly, the data point in the wrong direction,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said. “If there is to be college sports in the fall, we need to get a much better handle on the pandemic.”
It didn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. And perhaps there are still breakthroughs that will come in the next month or so that will make it easier and more practical for schools to acquire the equipment for rapid testing, which to this point has been less than perfect on accuracy.
“It’s still better than nothing,” Binney said. “Antigen tests or paper strip tests that return results very, very quickly are a lot less expensive, and maybe you could use right before a game or on game day. I think that would go a long way toward helping to filter out some players who might be missed by the PCR test.”
But once-a-week testing doesn’t seem like a strategy to keep the coronavirus out of college football; instead, it’s a concession to the reality that despite all of our resources and brainpower, this country has failed to get its act together.
If college football doesn’t happen, that’s the only reason why.
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July 17, 2020 at 07:36AM
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Opinion: If college football is scrapped, blame America's utter failure in COVID-19 testing - USA TODAY
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