By: John Walker, @realjohnwalker
SteelerNation.com
Saturday night the Pittsburgh Steelers held their training camp practice under the lights at Heinz Field. Head coach Mike Tomlin and his staff are gearing up for the regular season with another physical practice after emulating the pregame activities that would normally lead up to kickoff. However, there may have been a set back in the plan for Pittsburgh, as six Steelers had to be held out of the scheduled practice due to precautionary COVID procedures linked to false positive tests.
The NFL released the following statement following the issue:
“Saturday’s daily COVID testing returned several positives tests from each of the clubs serviced by the same laboratory in New Jersey. We are working with our testing partner, BioReference, to investigate these results, while the clubs work to confirm or rule out the positive tests. Clubs are taking immediate precautionary measures as outlined in the NFL-NFLPA’s health and safety protocols to include contact tracing, isolation of individuals and temporarily adjusting the schedule, where appropriate. The other laboratories used for NFL testing have not had similar results.”
Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert also released the following statement regarding the false positives:
“On Saturday, we had six players absent from practice due to our adherence to the NFL COVID-19 protocol. None of these players were required to be placed on Reserve/COVID-19 and will be returning to meetings today and practice on Monday.”
It appears the Steelers dodged a bullet, and were one of the handful of teams that were just struck by a strand of false positive tests. All of the players that were held out will now be allowed to get back to work with the team in full capacity.
More to come.
#SteelerNation
