Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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www.BLUEANDGOLD.com OCT. 10, 2020 19 room and reducing high-risk time spent together at the team hotel. The most problematic activity at the hotel is team meals, namely Friday dinner and Saturday breakfast. In a Sept. 29 interview with ESPN, Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly confirmed the morning meal before the USF game was the source. He noted that a player threw up on the sideline, was treated for dehydration and tested positive two days later. "We get into our game situation where we have a pregame meal to- gether, and that cost us. Big," Kelly said. "We had someone who was as- ymptomatic, and it spread like wild fire through our meeting area where we were eating, and then it got guys in contact tracing." Players are not assigned room- mates at the hotel, and any meetings are done with everyone distanced and masked. "Those meals become risky be- cause people are necessarily un- masked," Fox said. "They're with teammates, and the combination of eating and talking is risky." The locker room is already at half capacity before and after practice. "We're trying to see if they can de- densify it even further to avoid con- gestion," Fox said. Game transmission is not a major concern at this point. Neither Duke nor USF had any positives the day before they played at Notre Dame. Both also had no positives in their first tests after the game. Close con- tact, if anywhere, would come on the bench with players seated together. USF postponed its game against Florida Atlantic due to Notre Dame's spike and some absences that re- sulted from contact tracing the game film. Later that week, USF coach Jeff Scott said his team had a "small number" of positives. Scott declined to pin any of those on Notre Dame and called the con- tact tracing a "cumulative effect." Per Fox, the seven Irish players who tested positive on the Monday after the USF game tested negative the Friday before it. When combined with USF's clean tests, exposure to the virus likely occurred prior to Fri- day for those seven. "They were tested with very reli- able, sensitive and specific tests Fri- day afternoon," Fox said. "That test was negative, which at least suggests to me it's unlikely they had a suffi- cient viral load to represent a substan- tial risk of contagion at game time." Exposure, then, occurred some- where during the week. And what makes exposure at that time puzzling — and the locker room a point of scrutiny — is the lack of cases else- where on campus. Since Sept. 14, there have been 73 confirmed cases on campus, with the football team responsible for 29 of those. The team had 18 of the con- firmed 28 cases from Sept. 22-27. "Was there some setting where they were more relaxed than would have otherwise been the case?" Fox said. "Nothing we've identified yet. "My sense from the contact tracers is people have been pretty forthcom- ing, so if there were some big party where everyone was unmasked, we would have heard about it. But there's nothing I can point to." WHAT COMES NEXT Nothing has been announced re- garding Notre Dame's next game, scheduled for Oct. 10 against Florida State. Most of the 39 players began quar- antine or isolation sometime between Sept. 21-27, which in accordance with the timelines for each, would put them out of commission until early in the week leading up to the game against Florida State. The university does not release names of individuals or specific dates when players began their time in COVID protocols, but it's possible a majority of those 39 could be back in time to play in the Oct. 10 game. Rules for postponement leave the decision largely in the hands of the two schools. The ACC's postponement guide- lines state a game may be called off if there is "a COVID-19 cluster (as defined by the institution and/or lo- cal public health officials) within ei- ther or both teams competing in the game based upon that week's test re- sults as part of the Medical Advisory Group's three times per week testing the week of competition." The ACC's only minimum ros- ter size stipulation for playing is a team must have at least seven s c h o l a r s h i p o ff e n s i v e l i n e m e n available. It does not require a min- imum number of overall players or practices that week, but Kelly said before the season missing mul- tiple practices would jeopardize a team's ability to play in the game that weekend. "I would say if you canceled two of your practices — and those prob- ably being the two earliest practices, because you can't be physical late in the week," Kelly said. "If you're out of business Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, you're in trouble for having a team that can practice and be prepared. "If you lose two or three days early in the week, you're hard-pressed to get your team ready." That would put Tuesday, Oct. 6 as the latest possible day Notre Dame could start practice and potentially be ready for Florida State. Kelly told ESPN Sept. 29 that football prac- tice would resume on Wednesday, Sept. 30. Notre Dame's spike in cases has coincided with the Big Ten's and Pac-12's announcements of plans to return to play this fall, both of which are rooted in daily rapid testing. The ACC requires three tests per week, and Notre Dame has additional mea- sures that include testing some play- ers every day. Most of the players tested daily are linemen who are in contact with each other most frequently, by virtue of their position. The ACC and Notre Dame have indicated no plans to move to daily testing, a move that in Fox's eyes, would not make an appreciable dif- ference or slash the severity of the outbreak. "I personally feel the testing se- quence that had been laid out before really should be adequate because it detects a very low level of virus," Fox said. "The antigen test will miss some of those low levels, but they're designed in such a way that should capture people who are most likely contagious. "Being able to detect a lower level of virus, even though you do it less frequently, ought to be adequate." ✦ "It was both in terms of the number of players impacted and the need to get a handle on to what extent the rest of the team was impacted." ST. JOSEPH COUNTY DEPUTY PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICER DR. MARK FOX ON THE PRIMARY REASONS THE GAME AT WAKE FOREST WAS CALLED OFF