Facing Covid Spike, NFL Mandates Boosters, But Stops Shortly

[ad_1]

Mayer, the union’s medical director, disagrees.

“You can’t intervene in the face of what you know about the virus without knowing what the virus is doing,” he said.

The NFL’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills said in an interview on Nov. 30 that the increase in cases This season needs to be studied and answered in the context of the current landscape.

The NFL collects real-time data from testing, contact tracing and genomic sequencing, essentially virus fingerprinting that allows scientists to detect variants and map transmission chains. Sills said the genomic sequencing showed that in the majority of cases, transmission occurred in the outer community, not the highly vaccinated team population.

“We don’t think Covid Zero is an achievable goal,” he said, especially when the stay-at-home orders were restricted to movement, with players and their families interacting more with the outside world than last season. Sills said the task now is to avoid epidemics, serious illness and heart complications.

“I think our story this year has shown that even though our tests are still positive, we are not seeing the same burden of disease that we saw in 2020,” he said.

The NFL’s tests showed that vaccinated players who tested positive tended to have milder and shorter illnesses—about 20 percent of them emerged from isolation before 10 days, the league said. Unvaccinated players should be quarantined for at least 10 days if they test positive, vaccinated players can return when they have two negative tests 24 hours apart.

Epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota and league advisor on President Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, Dr. Michael Osterholm and other medical professionals who review the NFL’s data weekly said they believe the protocols available so far are sufficient to contain the coronavirus. spread. When cases or exposures do occur, clubs temporarily follow a set of stricter protocols that require more remote meetings, masking and daily testing for all staff regardless of vaccination status.

[ad_2]

Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *