Is The NFL Up To The Test? Accounts Vary

Another week in the NFL, another game of COVID-19 Bingo. Who’s tested positive, who’s sick, who’s died? Well, no on has died yet, a few have gotten mildly ill, and a bunch have visited the Reserve/ Covid-19 list since the league began compiling such things this summer. 

Confusion abounds. Should games even be played? Lions QB Matt Stafford was on the Reserve list early in the week for contact with a positive-test person. He tested negative on Thursday and flew to Minnesota for the game there Sunday. Then he was KO’d by a concussion. Go figure. One thing for sure, the oddsmakers are pulling their hair out trying to set lines when teams are so shorthanded.

And even if you’re not on the list the NFL is getting very ouchy about mask wearing, which it purports will lessen the virus’ spread. Pittsburgh head coach Mike Tomlin was fined $100,000 and the club $250,000 because coaches improperly wore facial coverings last Sunday. The Raiders head coach Jon Gruden’s been nailed, too, for improper use of the face diapers.

All this hyper-vigilance is fuelled by the PCR tests administered by the NFL— tests that even the league’s top doctor says obscure as much as they reveal. Dr. Alan Sills says that the public perception of these tests is like a pregnancy test: either positive or negative. “That’s simply not the way these tests operate,” Sills said in August. 

While the tests are good at finding even tiny traces of RNA, “you can have those small bits of RNA present for a lot of reasons that don’t reflect a new or active infection.” That’s why in Canada, where media slavishly talk about “cases”, not positives, only about one percent of these PCR tests result in a serious or critical “case”. Of those, just five percent die.

We wrote about this scattershot system on October 5, citing the New York Times. The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the… viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious. This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.”

In July, the Times reports, New York’s state lab identified 872 positive tests, based on a threshold of 40 cycles. With a cutoff of 35 cycles, however, about 43 percent of those tests would no longer qualify as positive. About 63 percent would no longer be judged positive if the cycles were limited to 30. Conversely, a higher cycle could produce huge numbers of positives.”

In other words, these tests produce a very loose picture of the #SARSCoV2 sample and scare a lot of people unnecessarily. “With the fate of an entire season of NFL or NHL in the balance is it possible that the simple yes/no results of PCR tests are an acceptable way of deciding who plays?” Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told the Times, “Yes-no isn’t good enough. It’s the amount of virus that should dictate the infected patient’s next steps… It’s really irresponsible to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue.”

In short, we could better distinguish real from asymptomatic cases if we changed testing methods. Plus, we have never systematically tested people without symptoms before in other pandemics like 1918, 1957-58, 1968 to 1969, 2009 to 2010.. It’s believed that many people then had traces of virus but survived without being labelled a “case”.

 Says Dr. Sills, "I think that’s a difficult message, and one that is hard to wrap our brains around. I tend to look at (a PCR result) as an unconfirmed positive, because I clearly feel there was a signal there… But it just does not mean that there’s an active infection there.”

That also applies to the Casedemic Crew of media and health authorities who are currently scaring the public about “cases” when what we are seeing is the inevitable fall bump in respiratory illness of all kinds— including COVID-19—married to large numbers of positive tests. This is the same PCR testing described above by Dr. Sills. The outcome has been panic to re-impose lockdowns and inflate the value of mask wearing.

As we wrote last month, “The same CaseDemic pattern emerged after the Swine flu epidemic in 2008-2009. When deaths dropped dramatically toward the end of the pandemic health officials created a CaseDemic of testing. Numbers spiked, officials scratched their heads and the media went full panic. 

“Strangely, while the testing produced startling numbers, deaths from Swine Flu flatlined. Eventually, officials and health types realized that they were chasing a ghost and ceased the furious testing. (For this data and more in this column we can’t recommend highly enough the work of Irish researcher Ivor Cummins who clearly illustrates the disconnect between the data and the political football of COVID-19."

What is clear is it’s highly unlikely we’ll see any resolution of the Covid-19 protocols before the Super Bowl in February. The league has married itself to the current PCR tests and hopes to simply have all 32 teams finish the 16-game schedule with no serious illness or deaths clouding play. Anything more— like full stands for the SB game— will be a bonus. Don’t hold your breath. That’s what masks are for.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx