The NBA is set to begin its 2020-21 season on Dec. 22 with Warriors-Nets and Clippers-Lakers, then will have a packed slate of Christmas Day games. But they’ve seen quite a large number of positive COVID-19 tests amongst their players in the initial testing phase conducted in home markets last week. Here’s more on that from a joint NBA/NBPA statement released Wednesday evening:
NBA players returned to a league-wide testing program over the past week, with testing beginning between Nov. 24-30 depending on the day that a player returned to the team’s market.
Of the 546 players tested for COVID-19 during this initial return-to-market testing phase, 48 have returned positive tests.
Anyone who has returned a confirmed positive test during this initial phase of testing in their team’s market is isolated until they are cleared for leaving isolation under the rules established by the NBA and the Players Association in accordance with CDC guidance.
That is most, if not all, of the league’s players tested. There are 30 NBA teams, and they can have active rosters of 17 players during the season (including 15 regular slots and then up to two players on two-way contracts), which would be 510 players. The offseason roster limit of 20 means there are up to 600 players on NBA rosters when not in a season. So this testing covered pretty much everyone.
And it returned quite a few positives. For comparison, 25 of 351 players (7.1 percent) tested positive ahead of the NBA bubble (seen above) at Disney World earlier this year (the number of players there is smaller, as not all teams went to the bubble). The new numbers of 48 of 546 reflects a 8.8 percent positivity rate.
While that’s below the current average for the whole U.S. (10.2 percent at the end of November as per Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center), it’s ahead of a lot of states. And it’s notably high considering that this was testing of all players, not just just those with suspected exposures or symptoms. So that certainly carries some concerns for the league’s restart, and for their plan to play this season in teams’ home markets rather than in another bubble or in hub cities.
[NBA.com]
