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Florida football reports five new COVID-19 cases days before LSU game

The Florida Gators have five new cases of COVID-19 among their football team as of a weekly update, the program announced Tuesday.

That number — presumed to be correlated to five distinct human beings producing said results — is the highest that Florida has reported in any COVID-19 testing update for its football program since mid-September, the second-highest since it began releasing detailed information about testing for the novel coronavirus this summer, and up dramatically from just one case reported last week.

Florida’s self-reporting of positive COVID-19 tests had been spotty over the summer, with numbers initially being reported by journalists rather than divulged by the program, and the program’s initial communication on the subject getting cloaked in vagaries like this positively-spun update from an August piece on the many precautions put in place by the football program:

The in-depth system the Gators put into action has produced effective results, highlighted by a month-long streak of no football players testing positive for COVID-19 or being quarantined following an initial learning curve when a string of positive tests and quarantines resulted as players adjusted to the new norm.