The nation’s foremost expert on infectious diseases, Anthony Fauci, believes testing for COVID-19 is of utmost importance as college athletes begin to return to campus.
After the entire sporting world was shut down in mid-March, college athletics is beginning to slowly reopen. The NCAA’s Division I Council voted last week to allow voluntary workouts on campus beginning June 1, and Ohio State has announced its plans to welcome football athletes back on campus beginning on June 8.
And while that’s all well and good, and a positive sign for things beginning to return to some semblance of normalcy, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases cautioned the need for testing and oversight during a wide-ranging interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“The athletes that tend to come back the earliest are the football players,” he told The Chronicle. “That’s a very intensive contact sport. What I think would be important if they’re going to do that is to test all the players and make sure that when they do come in, they come in all negative at the same time and then do the same sort of surveillance of them and make sure the people who are associated with them — the people who serve their meals, the people who are involved in training with them — also are protected in the sense of wearing masks and doing social distancing to the extent possible.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci discussed what needs to be done for athletes to safely return to college campuses. https://t.co/Ni5R7owvo5
— USA TODAY Sports (@usatodaysports) May 23, 2020
Everyone is anxious to get this country going again, and it is beginning to happen as businesses, industry, and yes — sports begin to come out of the fog from the measures put in place to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. The issue is that nobody really knows where all of this leading, and whether we’ll see any re-emergence of the novel coronavirus.
Fauci believes because of that, testing must be an integral part of whatever reopening and maintenance plan is put in place. It’s hard to argue with that.
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