One day after returning to game action in Sunday afternoon’s ugly loss to the Broncos at Gillette Stadium, Patriots quarterback Cam Newton joined the Greg Hill Show for his weekly phone conversation.
One of the key questions asked was if Newton knew where he contracted COVID-19, testing positive for the virus on Oct. 2, forcing him to miss New England’s Week 4 battle with the Chiefs in Kansas City.
“So you still have no idea where you got it from?,” host Greg Hill wondered.
“Correct,” Newton said. “I think the biggest scare here for everybody was just my, I guess, daily routine of how many hours I put in the facility. And if I contracted it, if anybody who would have had a red flag, I think it would have been me. Here’s a person who’s here as long as he is. Who was he around? Who did he touch? Things like that. And I was more concerned about it, because I didn’t want to put nobody else on the team in jeopardy for this.
“The fact that Steph [Gilmore] contracted it was my worst nightmare being that I would never want to sabotage anything to the slightest degree, because I know what we have the capability of becoming. And yet, through it all, we saw it and got a better understanding of it.”
Newton made it clear that he didn’t want to spend a lot of time dwelling on the COVID-19 discussion or details of what he and the team went through over the last two weeks.
“I’ve passed that phase. Hopefully this team has passed that phase,” Newton said despite the uncertain origins of the virus within the New England organization. “I do believe we had the proper precautions and you still cannot understand where it’s stemming from.”
Newton did acknowledge that this was the strangest two weeks of his career, beginning with the positive test that caught him completely off guard.
“Oh, without a doubt. Without a doubt,” Newton said. “Here I am, I get prepared for something and then I find out the day before (game vs. Kansas City) that I am not going to go. I was thinking as optimistic as [I] could be. I was like, ‘Man, it’s a false positive.’ Then it ended up being true. You go through it, games get rescheduled and you just sit to wonder. You can’t do anything. You can’t work out. And obviously, me being who I am, it’s not like you just take this time to go vacation somewhere. So through it all, it has been weird. It has been an adjustment to your routine. But yet, people don’t pay attention to all of that stuff. They just want production and so do I.”
