The Golden State Warriors won't test healthy players for coronavirus after other symptom-free sports stars and celebrities have found easy access to test kits
- The San Francisco-based Golden State Warriors aren't testing healthy players for the coronavirus disease, known as COVID-19.
- The announcement comes after it was revealed that celebrities and NBA stars were quickly being tested for the virus amid a national shortage of COVID-19 test kits.
- After a Utah Jazz player tested positive for the disease, the team obtained 58 tests for its athletes and staff.
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The San Francisco-based Golden State Warriors aren't testing healthy players for the coronavirus disease, known as COVID-19, the team's general manager, Bob Myers, said in a conference call Tuesday.
"We're treating ourselves like people, which is what we are. We're not better than anybody. We're not worse. We're just a basketball team, like any company. Right now, we're not interacting with anybody. I've been told by our doctors that we shouldn't be testing asymptomatic people in California," Myers said on the call according to USA Today. The team will, however, test players if they start exhibiting symptoms of the virus.
The announcement comes after celebrities like Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, and Idris Elba, and professional athletes - some asymptomatic - were so quickly tested and diagnosed amid a national shortage of COVID-19 test kits, as Insider's Julia Naftulin and Shira Feder reported.
Fewer than 9,000 people in California had been tested for the coronavirus in total as of Monday, according to the LA Times. For comparison, South Korea - a country with a lower virus death rate than in China or the US - has the capacity to test 10,000 people per day.
Hanks and Wilson were tested when they were in Australia, a country whose response to the coronavirus has been noted as efficient, which could explain why the tests were obtained so quickly.
But in the US, a significant portion of the tests have been performed on NBA players. After Jazz's Rudy Gobert was found to have tested positive for the virus, the team obtained 58 tests for its members, regardless of if they felt ill or not. The day before, just over 50 people had been tested in each state in the US.
Seven NBA stars have tested positive so far, including four Brooklyn Nets players, one of whom is former Golden State Warrior Kevin Durant. Durant told The Athletic's Shams Charania that he has yet to exhibit symptoms associated with the virus and is feeling fine.
The Nets paid a private company to conduct the tests, according to ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski. The Oklahoma City Thunder did something similar.
The Nets' last game was against Lebron James and the LA Lakers, whose players were tested for the coronavirus on Wednesday. Results will be back Friday, according to the LA Times.
The sports world has taken a hit amid the coronavirus outbreak. The NBA season has been suspended, and the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California, was canceled.