Imagine this scenario:
A football player who has sickle cell anemia, an underlying complication which might make him more vulnerable to harmful effects of COVID-19, receives a group text from a teammate. That teammate is the player’s roommate.
That teammate announced that he had tested positive for COVID-19.
The player who received the group text was not informed of his teammate’s — and roommate’s — positive COVID-19 test by coaches, staff, or other university personnel. He was informed by his teammate.
That scenario is not a far-off product of one’s imagination.
It actually happened, and is documented in this USA TODAY report.
High marks go to the vigilant, thoughtful teammate who was considerate enough to inform his friends about his positive test. Obviously, though, athletes themselves shouldn’t bear the burden of having to inform each other of positive COVID-19 test results.
That is the school’s job, whether from the medical division or the athletic department, if not both (which should be the ideal process).
If disclosure and communication are that unreliable at this point — with an athlete having sickle cell anemia being part of this highly complicated situation — one can’t be particularly confident that the season will get very far.
Maybe the season will begin, but if communication remains this sloppy, schools won’t be remotely close to the level of organization and discipline needed to pull off a season.
Colleges can’t easily (if at all) keep their athletes in a bubble the way the NBA and NHL are managing to do. The process has to be a lot better.
Shivani Patel, an assistant professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, was quoted in the USA TODAY story linked to above, addressing scenarios such as the one in which a football player learned from a teammate — not the school — about a positive test within his team:
“To hide behind the privacy issue I find to be shameful,’’ she said, “because if we’re going to make decisions about the safety of these players, the safety for the coaches, also the general student body at large once everyone returns to campus, we’re going to need to have disclosure.
“I would say that is a major concern from a public health perspective because I think players need to know what is happening. The way that we can understand our own level of risk oftentimes is through comparison and through benchmarking. So if we don’t know what is happening in other conferences with other teams, it’s really hard to gauge if whatever we’re experiencing is typical.’’