The Tennessee Titans are the first team to encounter an in-season outbreak of COVID-19, as the NFL attempts to complete a season during the pandemic.
The Titans had another staffer test positive on Wednesday after eight players and staffers tested positive since they played the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday. That brings them to a total of nine.
Bill Belichick stressed that the New England Patriots have consistently been vigilant to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within their facility. They won’t change anything — they’ll simply continue to be vigilant.
“It’s a very, obviously, a good reminder for all of us of the situation that we’re in,” Belichick said in a video conference. “And regardless of what we’ve done or haven’t done up to this point, it really is about what we do each day going forward.”
New England hasn’t had a single player test positive for COVID-19 since teams began reporting for training camp. They’d like to keep it that way.
“We monitor everything every day,” Belichick said. “We don’t just do it when there’s a problem or something comes up somewhere else. We do it on a daily basis and make everyone — because this is everybody; it’s not just players, it’s players and coaches and staff and everybody else — make everyone aware. If we can do something better, then we talk to them about how we can do it better.
“So we try to monitor it the best we can, and we, I think, are pretty vigilant with — really, all of us; it’s not any one person — all of us keeping an eye on things. If anybody sees something that’s not the way we talked about it or maybe something that’s a little off or that we need to take a better look at, then we do that. We’ve had that situation come up multiple times as things have changed, as we went through the different phases of training camp, as we got into the regular-season schedule and then we traveled.”
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