The NHL’s rate of COVID-19 infection remains as it has been, according to the league’s latest data.
The league announced Monday morning that 140 players, give or take, began skating at team facilities in the past week, bringing them under Phase 2 testing protocols.
And over the past week, eight more players were confirmed positive for COVID-19 using league-directed testing protocols.
In all, 396 players have now skated at a team facility since they opened on June 8 and have been tested; 23 have tested positive at some point.
That’s a 5.8 per cent positive-test rate.
Furthermore, the NHL confirmed that another player has tested positive in the community, meaning there are now 12 players who are not skating at a team facility who are COVID-19 positive.
That’s about four per cent of the 300 or so players who are not skating at a team facility, or who won’t be skating at all because they’re on one of the seven teams that is not going to take part in the Stanley Cup playoffs qualifying round, scheduled to begin next month.
Emory University epidemiologist Dr. Zach Binney expressed cautious optimism to Postmedia last week about the NHL’s rate of infection, noting it wasn’t out of line with broader infection rates in the United States.
His outlook for the NHL remained much the same after the recent round of test results.
Still, as Binney pointed out on Twitter Monday morning, while the infection rate is still relatively low, we don’t know the infection vectors for any of these positive cases, we also don’t know how many of these cases are connected to each other and we don’t know how these positive results are distributed.
Four St. Louis Blues players and a coach have tested positive for COVID-19, apparently through team testing late last week . The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported those cases may be linked to a bar at least one of the players visited recently.
“Unwise,” Binney told Postmedia News of whether athletes should be going to a public venue like a bar at this time.
A trio of Tampa Bay Lightning players tested positive last month as well. But other than these two instances, there’s been no official suggestion of any other team-connected outbreaks.
If there’s a surge of team-connected outbreaks, the NHL could be in trouble. Teams are scheduled to begin return-to-play training camps on Monday, heightening the risk of rapid infection across groups of players.
Teams would have to scale down activities or even quarantine a large portion of their roster were that to happen.
If a team had to quarantine — as has happened in Major League Soccer — the league’s return-to-play plan could be in jeopardy.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
