NFL’s chief medical officer Allen Sills on Thursday said that symptomatic players are driving the spread of COVID-19 in the league.
He told ESPN that asymptomatic players are not responsible for the transmission of the disease from what he has observed this season.
“I think all of our concern about [asymptomatic spread] has been going down based on what we’ve been seeing throughout the past several months,” Sills told ESPN.
“We’ve got our hands full with symptomatic people. Can I tell you tonight that there has never been a case when someone without symptoms passed it on to someone else? No, of course, I can’t say that. But what I can say to you is that I think it’s a very, very tiny fraction of the overall problem, if it exists at all.”
He added that the most important thing to contain the spread is “symptom recognition and prompt testing.”
“As we’ve gone back and looked throughout the entire season, what we’ve seen consistently is that when people have symptoms, that’s when they seem to be contagious to others,” he said to the NFL Network according to The Associated Press.
“And that’s why we’re asking people to come forward and acknowledge symptoms because that’s the point at which they’re vulnerable and the point at which they expose themselves to others,” he added.
On Dec. 15, the league said the number of positive cases on two days that week ended up at 88, but about 100 is more accurate. It was the worst three-day stretch for the NFL during the pandemic, the AP reported.
However, the Wall Street Journal reported that from Dec. 13 through this Thursday, 321 players have tested positive in under two weeks. This represents almost 10 percent of its total rostered players, the report added.
The NFL has also loosened testing requirements for fully vaccinated players who are not showing COVID-19 symptoms, nixing the weekly testing mandate for those players. Around 95 percent of the players in the league are vaccinated.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell informed teams in a memo on Saturday that only unvaccinated players and inoculated players experiencing possible COVID-19 symptoms will be subject to testing requirements. Previous league protocols required that vaccinated players had to be tested weekly.
However, the new testing protocols have raised concerns about infections among asymptomatic, vaccinated players and coaches would go undetected, and could lead to additional transmission in team facilities.