High NFL COVID-19 vaccination rates offer a “unique opportunity” to model a way out of the ongoing pandemic for the entire country, NFL medical director Dr. Allen Sills, in an interview with ESPN.
“We know we will have positive cases this season,” Sills said a day before the league is scheduled to open the regular season of 2021. “I don’t think ‘COVID zero’ is an achievable goal and we all need to understand that. what we believe we can do is keep our team environments as safe as possible, prevent widespread outbreaks and, with vaccines in place, turn this into a seasonal disease rather than a devastating pandemic. “
The NFL managed to play all of its 2020 games, most on schedule, and Sills is optimistic that it will follow a similar path in 2021. Positive tests will again alter the availability of individual players and staff members, but the league expects most of the corresponding diseases to be mild and there has already been evidence that large-scale outbreaks between teams will be less likely than in 2020, Sills said.
As of this week, 93.5% of NFL players and more than 99% of other football-related staff members are vaccinated at least partially. Unvaccinated players are tested daily and must follow a number of additional protocols, while fully vaccinated players are tested once a week. The NFL Players Association has demanded daily testing for all players, saying it would reduce the chance of vaccinated players spreading the virus among themselves, but Sills said those cases have been “incredibly rare.”
According to NFLPA President JC Tretter, 14 Tennessee Titans players or coaches have tested positive this summer. But the league has not classified any series of team test results as outbreaks because it saw no evidence of uncontrolled spread at the team’s facilities. Speaking in general, and not about any specific team, Sills said, “We already have enough data to say that vaccinated people don’t transmit in a way that causes widespread outbreaks because we don’t see the kind of outbreaks we saw last year.”
The NFL also has no documented evidence of a single case of spreading outdoors or during games, Sills said, despite the increased transmissibility of the delta variant.
Since the beginning of the training camp, the incidence rate of NFL COVID-19 (the number of positive tests relative to the complete set of tests) has been about 1% of the approximately 6,000 people who they are part of the NFL testing group. Fully vaccinated players who test positive can return to the field more quickly, they only need to return two negative tests 24 hours apart, but they usually take a week or more during training.
According to Sills, some vaccinated players have been cleared in a matter of days, probably because the league’s MESA tests have detected more exposure than infection. Others have returned towards the end of a ten-day period and some have needed more.
“The vaccines were designed to prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death,” Sills said, “and they’re doing a fantastic job both inside and outside the NFL. Ideally, making vaccines is turning more serious illnesses into more We are seeing people without symptoms or with very few symptoms and who have a short duration of the disease.I do not consider it a failure of the vaccine.I consider it a success of the vaccine.We can convert “In a mild respiratory illness.”