The Minnesota Vikings have had eight players and four staff members test positive for COVID-19, but the results have come from a lab that is the subject of an NFL investigation.
According to NFL Network’s Tom Pellissero, the BioReference lab that the league has been working with produced “irregularities in results” with Saturday’s daily testing of players and staff members and are looking into the matter as several teams across the league have been impacted.
The NFL has conducted well over 100,000 COVID-19 tests since camp began with a positivity rate that's a fraction of 1% and dropping. A sudden flood of positives from different testing sites, all processed by the same lab, raises a red flag. https://t.co/UOuBGzL4LR
— Tom Pelissero (@TomPelissero) August 23, 2020
Head coach Mike Zimmer confirmed in his daily press conference that the Vikings are one of those teams and have decided to hold their afternoon practice on Sunday, but will hold the players and staff members in question out and may cut it short.
The results of the investigation are also important as it could require all that tested positive to register two negative tests before returning to the field per the NFL’s COVID-19 protocol.
“If these all turn out negative, then there was a problem at the lab,” Zimmer said via ESPN’s Courtney Cronin. “Obviously if they’re positive, then there might be a problem with the things that we’re doing or other teams are doing or whatever.”
Other teams impacted by the tests include the Chicago Bears, Cleveland Browns, Green Bay Packers, New York Giants, New York Jets, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Unlike Major League Baseball, which has seen several team outbreaks throughout its 2020 season, the NFL had avoided such issues in the early weeks of training camp with just 0.46% of all tests resulting in a positive result last week.
Under the NFL guidelines, the Vikings are not obliged to identify which players have tested positive for COVID-19.
