NEW YORK (WBEN/AP) — The NFL revealed Sunday that several positive COVID-19 tests were found a day earlier by one of its testing partners. It appears that the Buffalo Bills were among the teams reporting false positives.
“Definitely probably better that this happened now than three weeks from now,” said Buffalo Bills general manager Brandon Beane, whose club had some of those positive results. “But it seems like every few weeks, or even every week, something’s going on. Who know what the next curveball will be?”
Beane said tests in the Northeast had gone “haywire,” and called it “a lab issue and not a true issue with our guys currently” after several Bills were held out of practice including starting quarterback, Josh Allen.
Beane stressed the need for transparency throughout the Bills’ organization and said some players were on a conference call with the NFL’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills.
“We had an open dialogue with our players,” he explained. “We even had some of our leadership crew of players on with Dr. Sills this morning just hearing directly with him, who’s aware of all these tests that have gone a little bit haywire here in the Northeast. I think that was good for them to hear, because naturally, if you’re going to be out there tackling and blocking and things like that, passing the ball around, people might be unnerved if we got some guys missing.”
The league has asked the New Jersey lab BioReference to investigate the results “while the clubs work to confirm or rule out the positive tests.” The NFL did not identify the teams or say how many tests altogether were positive.
The NY Jets, another team affected by the test reporting canceled a walk-through on Saturday night but had a full practice Sunday morning after the previously positive tests came back negative. The Chicago Bears, Minnesota Vikings and Pittsburgh Steelers were also affected.