Yesterday, the University of Houston suspended all voluntary workouts after coronavirus tests came back positive for six athletes. The six positive tests aren’t surprising. Take a random sample of Americans right now, and make that sample a certain size, and there will be positive tests. And while the suspension of voluntary workouts is, to my knowledge, the first such suspension since athletes began returning to campuses earlier this month, it’s not the most telling piece of the story.
The most telling piece of the story comes in two parts. The first: In Houston’s release, they described the patients as “symptomatic.” The second: According to the Houston Chronicle, Houston didn’t test all their athletes upon the athletes’ return to campus. They only tested those with symptoms—possibly only those with a fever above 100.2 degrees (a number taken from CDC guidelines). In other words, Houston did not proactively test. Houston—not a Power Five athletic department, but one of the strongest non-Power Five departments in at least football and men’s basketball—either did not have access to enough tests, found tests too expensive to be used on everyone, or deemed proactive testing unnecessary.
That’s a wide range of possible explanations, but all three are concerning. The first two in particular don’t point in the direction of collegiate sports happening this fall, or even this academic year. While we already knew there are still not enough tests nationally (the shortage is lessening, but it’s not solved), it’s a bit startling to take in the implication that tests are so scarce that Houston was unable to obtain enough for a proactive testing regimen, or unwilling to pay the cost. If that remains the case, the proactive testing and tracing that, from the sounds of it, is likely necessary to prevent either a lockdown or an outbreak on a college campus is not going to be possible.
In the event that Houston’s decision to forgo proactive testing was independent of test scarcity, the matter becomes muddier, and begins to turn towards questions of why Houston didn’t deem proactive testing necessary. On one side, it could reflect a belief that the university doesn’t bear legal risk, which, if that belief is shared by other schools’ respective legal counsels, points towards college sports happening this fall even if there are campus outbreaks. On the other side, Houston did suspend workouts, suggesting an outbreak is not at this point something it wants to accept.
Broadly, the situation at Houston is just one data point, but it’s not going to be the only of its kind. It highlights the independence of schools and conferences in all this (not that the NCAA should necessarily be making a protocol, or that it even can legally make a protocol—I don’t know whether they can or should), and it exhibits how one school—even one that was evidently rather cavalier about testing, initially—views the virus as serious enough to warrant a complete shutdown of athletic gatherings in response to a possible outbreak.
This mention of a school viewing the virus as serious may come across as surprising to some. The United States has over 115,000 confirmed deaths from this thing, and the true total number of deaths remains higher. Of course schools are taking this seriously, you might be thinking. It’s worth mentioning, though, because if the virus kills 450,000 over the twelve month March-February stretch (a rough projection in which the pace of deaths stays largely constant), that’s still not quite twelve times as bad as the flu, and while I personally view “twelve times as bad as the flu” as terrible, it’s possible universities don’t, especially given that their athletes are, on the aggregate, young and healthy by definition. I’m far from an expert in liability law, but presumably, universities are, and they haven’t seemed concerned enough by the virus to stop athletes from returning to campus in the first place. Again, though, now that one school’s facing what could be a rather significant outbreak, the concern is large enough that they’ve chosen stop activities. There are degrees of taking something seriously.
We’ll continue to monitor the situation at Houston and the situation more broadly. News will continue to emerge. Things might change if some states and localities change direction and begin to reimpliment repealed shutdown measures. Things might change when practices shift from ostensibly voluntary (and uncoached) to admittedly mandatory (and coached, and therefore more costly competition-wise to cancel). Things might change if a few prominent schools (Duke is one to watch, given their aggressive response to the virus in March) come out strongly against risking things and cancel their own fall seasons. It’s a messy, messy situation, and it encapsulates a lot of (what would be) the broader debate about the approach to the virus as a whole (if this hadn’t idiotically turned into yet another red-state vs. blue-state slap fight): Flattening the Curve vs. Eliminating the Virus; Economic Disaster vs. Loss of Human Life; Waiting for a Vaccine vs. Vaccines Still Take a While and Aren’t Perfect and Viruses Mutate and We Don’t Know That Much About This One. We’ll see what happens next.
I think you’ve stumbled upon what could be an interesting topic for a series: collegiate athletic department protocols for testing. Would be interesting for you to contact a cross sample of colleges and request a copy of their testing protocol and see what you learn. Perhaps patterns will emerge that you can tie to a) state b) size of endowment c) size of enrollment or d) other. I’ll be interesting in any follow-up, should you decide to pursue this as a journalism deep-dive.