New testing begins for Iowa football
Today was the start of something new for the Iowa football team. The Hawkeyes, along with the other Big Ten football programs, starting daily rapid testing for Covid-19. We caught up with Iowa team physician Dr. Andy Peterson, to learn more about how the testing will be administered to the players, how many people will be tested on a daily basis, and much more.
Q: What is the main difference you are going to see with the new testing?
DR. PETERSON: Well today is Day One, so it’s been a lot of activity to get all the pieces in place and get things rolling. The big key is that the core group that is in this group of 170 that will have daily antigen testing will not need to contact trace and be quarantined if they are exposed to someone who is positive. It should help us maintain a good number of people at practice and avoid having big groups of people being quarantined.
Q: Will it just be the coaches and players who will be tested daily?
DR. PETERSON: Yeah, we have a cap for every school at 170 and we cannot purchase extra tests. We have 124 players on the roster, so we have to test them daily and then 46 support staff, which are mainly trainers or athletic support staff that have face to face contact with the players.
Q: So folks who probably don’t get tested would be people who mainly just work around the office side of things? Will managers get tested?
DR. PETERSON: Correct. The mangers that are out on the field will get daily testing. They are really involved with the practices with things like handling the ball and things of that nature. They are face to face with the players so they will be getting daily testing.
Q: Can you explain the antigen testing and how that is different from the testing that you guys were doing where you were getting results in 6 to 8 hours?
DR. PETERSON: Actually it was closer to 4-6 hours, so we were getting really good service at the hospital. So instead of a PCR based test, which is really the only confirmatory diagnostic test available right now, antigen testing is a screening test. It has pretty good sensitivity, but not quite as good as the PCR, but if you have the disease you are very likely to test positive. That’s why it’s daily because you can make up for some of the deficiencies and we like to think that no one would slip by us. We can hopefully catch people early on in the disease process before they could be symptomatic. That’s the whole point of this, if you test them every day, then you are capturing them before they become contagious and you should be able to limit the number of transmissions from one case. It is not a diagnostic, so anyone who tests positive in an antigen test still needs PCR based testing for confirmation. The conference is considering someone who is positive from an antigen test and negative on their PCR to be a negative and they could be back at practice the next day and back in the daily testing pool.
Q: If someone tests positive, even with daily testing do you still kind of monitor those who might be close with that player or be a roommate or do you just keep testing them and that’s it?
DR. PETERSON: You really don’t. If the roommate is in the daily testing pool they don’t have to do anything different other than take the daily test. There wouldn’t be any restrictions.
Q: Last time when we spoke after the Big Ten shut things down, you were pretty up front that you felt that there would have been games postponed or canceled in the Big Ten if they had gone ahead at that time. Do you feel this new testing will make that much less likely now?
DR. PETERSON: I do, but some of that is due to community prevalence. We had one week where we had 93 positive tests in athletics and now we are getting a handful instead of a tidal wave in one week. I think the decrease in community prevalence will help us to play moving forward.
Also, I think this plan is a good one. We didn’t develop it, but I think it’s reasonable. I think there’s a good chance that we will be able to capture people early enough that the chances of us playing most of our games is pretty good. There will be hiccups along the way and there’s a chance that some games might get canceled, but the majority of the game should get played.
Q: So how will it work on a daily basis for the players? Do they just walk in the building in the morning and first thing that happens is they get tested?
DR. PETERSON: We are doing it after practice. We have to test daily, but there’s not really a rule on when we do it. There are rules on game day when we have to test four hours prior to kickoff. For the daily testing, as long as we test at the same time every day we can do it after practice. We practice in the morning and lot of schools practice in the afternoon. We will have our normal practice in the morning and then sometime around 11 in the three hours after that we will get all 170 tests done for that day.
Q: Is there more of a risk doing it after practice since they could potentially be sharing the virus before they would have been tested that day?
DR. PETERSON: No one really knows the answer to that, but we don’t think so. As long as we are doing routine daily testing that we should be capturing them before they become contagious. I think everyone believes we are going to be ok doing it this way.
Q: Does the new daily testing include the basketball program and wrestling?
DR. PETERSON: No, it’s just for football at this point. We anticipate the same types of protocols will be rolling out for other sports. The committee that worked on the resumption of football activities are working on this now for winter sports, so there might be some differences in protocols, but we expect they will be similar.
Q: What has the last month been like for you? A month ago you thought this was basically done and the decision had been made and now you have to ramp things up in a different way.
DR. PETERSON: Yeah, change is hard, right. We had a very robust protocol and we were comfortable with our policies and procedures. Things were going really well for us and everything was going fairly smooth and then it got blown up by this new policy. We have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it would look like. We got the final guidelines last night and the folks who are doing the testing arrived on campus yesterday. The Big Ten is coordinating and directly paying for the testing. So this week a bunch of equipment and seven additional personnel arrived this week on campus and they are doing the testing. They are handling all that and we would handle the confirmatory PCR testing. A company called Biodesix is handling the staffing for the antigen testing. We will be using the Quidel rapid test, which is probably the best rapid test out there.
Q: A lot of people are wondering about the 21 days off with a Covid positive test. Could you dive into that process a bit and explain it?
DR. PETERSON: It is essentially no change. Basically it just codifies what everyone was already doing. Once you test positive you are isolated and you can come out after 14 days and then they go into cardiac testing. Prior to Sept. 16th it was an ECG and after that it was also a cardiac MRI and a visit with our cardiologist, Ian Law. The big difference there is that you still have to have the rest period and the cardiac testing and you still had a graduated return to sports, which took a week anyway. Basically we were at 21 days anyway before the return to full activity.