431. Why Can’t Schools Get What the N.F.L. Has?

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🗓️ 10 September 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

Thanks to daily Covid testing and regimented protocols, the new football season is underway. Meanwhile, most teachers, students, and parents are essentially waiting for the storm to pass. And school isn’t even a contact sport (usually).

Transcript

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0:00.0	After months of planning and negotiating and establishing a COVID-19 protocol, the National
0:09.6	Football League was rolling along. They had decided to skip preseason games, which no one
0:15.8	really likes anyway, and by late July, all 32 teams were deep into training camp. Every
0:22.2	single person was given a COVID test every day, every player and coach and trainer and
0:28.4	team employee, and so far only a handful had tested positive. Miraculously, it looked like
0:34.8	the season would start as scheduled on September 10th, but then one morning in late August,
0:41.7	it all seemed to be going sideways.
0:43.4	77 total people, 44 players and 33 club employees tested positive.
0:51.0	That's Dr. Tom Mayer.
0:52.0	It's a nightmare scenario. Let's just be clear when you start hearing that. Mayor, whose
0:59.4	background is in emergency medicine, was one of the command physicians at the Pentagon
1:04.3	Rescue Operation on 9-11. Now he is the chief medical officer of the NFL Players Association,
1:10.9	the union that represents the players. These positive COVID results, Mayor says,
1:16.6	started with tests that were done on the Steelers.
1:19.4	With Pittsburgh Steelers, it turned out we're just one of 11 teams that had positive COVID
1:24.4	results.
1:25.6	We locked the players down and the staff down.
1:28.8	How did Mayor first hear news of those 77 positive COVID tests?
1:33.1	I got a call from my counterpart with the NFL telling me that this is what we're looking
1:37.6	at.
1:38.6	His counterpart is a doctor named Alan Sills.
1:41.8	I'm a professor of neurosurgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the chief medical
	...

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