Dr. Anthony Fauci says NFL teams need to be prepared to 'shut it down' if multiple players wind up testing positive for COVID-19 mid-season
- Dr. Anthony Fauci said that NFL teams would need to be prepared to make some drastic mid-season moves should multiple players test positive for COVID-19.
- Speaking with NBC Sports' Peter King, Fauci said, "Once you wind up having a situation where it looks like it's spread within a team, you got a real problem."
- Teams that report having multiple players test positive would have to be ready to self-quarantine for 14 days, raising questions as to what would happen to any games scheduled they were set to play during that time.
- Fauci said that while teams would have to be prepared for the worst, it is "feasible" that players who test negative could play this fall.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci has a few tips on what NFL teams should be prepared for in the coming season.
Speaking with NBC Sports' Peter King, Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that teams would have to be ready to "shut it down" if multiple players tested positive for COVID-19 in between games this fall.
King had asked what would happen if four players out of a 53-man roster tested positive on a Saturday night before a game.
"You got a problem there," Fauci said, interrupting King's question. "You know why? Because it is likely that if four of them are positive and they've been hanging around together, that the other ones that are negative are really positive. So I mean, if you have one outlier [only one player testing positive], I think you might get away. But once you wind up having a situation where it looks like it's spread within a team, you got a real problem. You gotta shut it down."
Fauci advised teams that have multiple players test positive to take a two-week quarantine, with the league left to figure out if their games would have to be outright canceled or postponed to a later date. Fauci also said that teams would have to be ready to go without their superstar players should they wind up testing positive, even if it meant the likes of Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson watching from the sidelines.
"It would be malpractice in medicine to put him on the field, absolutely," Fauci said.
While Fauci's plans for teams that might later deal with an outbreak of players testing positive sound drastic, he wasn't opposed outright to the possibility that football could take place in some fashion.
"I think it's feasible that negative testing players could play to an empty stadium," Fauci said. "Is it guaranteed? No way ... There will be virus out there, and you will know your players are negative at the time they step onto the field."
Fauci even said that fans might be able to attend games if things break the right way, with stadiums filled to a fraction of their capacity so social distancing can be maintained. Ultimately, the return of the NFL is going to come down to two factors — the direction the virus takes in the next three months, and the United States' capacity for mass testing.
While the former point is still unknown, Fauci expressed confidence that the latter could be accomplished.
"By the end of August, we should have in place Antigen testings . . . You could test millions of people, millions of people. But again, we have to make sure that the companies that are doing these tests actually produce them. Which given the country that we have, such a rich country, I would be very surprised if we can't do that."
As things stand, the NFL is staying the course that the 2020 season will go off as planned — a line they are likely to stick to until changes are necessary. It was just two months ago that the sports world was brought to a sudden stop by the pandemic — a lot more could change in the next three months ahead of Week 1 kicking off this fall.
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