NFL doctor on how league deemed Patriots-Chiefs game safe to play despite COVID-19 case
News of Patriots cornerback Stephon Gilmore’s positive COVID-19 test, which came to light36 hours after New England played the Chiefs, raised some questions about why the game was held in the first place.
On Saturday, results from tests a day earlier showed Patriots quarterback Cam Newton and Chiefs practice squad quarterback Jordan Ta’amu had positive COVID-19 results. The Chiefs-Patriots game, scheduled for Sunday afternoon was pushed to Monday night.
New England defensive tackle Bill Murray, who is on the Patriots’ practice squad, also tested positive for COVID-19 this week.
Should the Chiefs-Patriots game have taken place in the wake of Newton’s positive result? NFL chief medical officer Allen Sills was asked on the NFL Network how the league decided Monday’s game was safe to play.
“Any time we have a positive test, the first thing we do is obviously go through a contact-tracing protocol to look at how many close contacts there may be,” Sills said. “And that’s exactly what we did in this case. And in reviewing that, we were given information that there were no what we call high-risk close contacts. There were some other close contacts that were identified. All of those close contacts were tested and screened for our protocol.
“We actually had four days of testing of them if you think about it. It was Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. And we also took the additional step of reviewing the video of inside the Patriots’ facility to look at the compliance with mask-wearing. What we found there was the compliance was very high.
“Cam Newton was wearing a mask, he was wearing his tracking device and everyone around him was wearing a mask. So, that gave us some comfort that, given the facts of no additional positive tests, given the apparent compliance of the team and given the way that the close contacts were labeled, that we could move forward. As I’ve emphasized before, this isn’t a decision we make in isolation. We take that data, we look at it with our experts in infectious disease and epidemiology and make what we think is the safest decision for everyone involved.”
Here is the interview with Judy Battista of the NFL Network:
