Not long ago, false positives were the NFL’s biggest COVID-19 testing problem.
In early August, one failure forced Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford into a brief and wholly unnecessary quarantine, ultimately proving it was possible a healthy player could miss a game due to a last-minute testing mistake. Just a few weeks later came the tidal wave of 77 positive tests in one weekend, all mistakenly triggered by an offsite contamination that suggested the system was only as reliable as the laboratories processing the results.
In less than a month, these two incidents revealed flaws that would require serious troubleshooting.