The NFL and NFL Players Association have reached agreement on one of the biggest lingering issues regarding the approach to pro football in a pandemic.
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, the NFL has agreed to conduct daily COVID-19 testing.
Mark Maske of the Washington Post reports that the daily testing will last for a minimum of two weeks, and that it thereafter can be adjusted. (The players won’t want it to be adjusted.)
The players had pushed aggressively for daily testing. The league had wanted to test less frequently, in part because there are questions regarding the utility of daily testing — in part because test results won’t be available for roughly 24 hours.
Still, more testing is better than less testing. As 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman recently told Peter King, the possibility of false positives and false negatives makes it even more important to test over and over again.
It won’t be cheap, but the NFL will foot the bill. As one source explained it to PFT, BioReference Laboratories and the NFL have a general deal for 120 tests per day, with a flat fee divided by the 32 teams. Extra tests are available to each team at a rate of $125 per test.