If they really have to show 14 days with less than or only 2 positives it doesn't seem like the Big Game can be played? And if Dec. 4 is already committed to USC would that mean Cal forfeits the Big Game?
I think you're misinterpreting the Berkeley Health message. TESTING must continue twice per week until fewer than 3 positives over 14 days; after that, it's testing once per week until there are zero cases for 14 days.
ISOLATION, on the other hand is for 10 days following onset of symptoms, AND at least 24 hours have passed since resolution of fever, AND other symptoms have improved.
Knowlton said that several players were added to the list on Monday and their addition was "mostly" from one position group. Ten days from Monday is the 18th, leaving those guys 1 practice day ~ if they test negative. Fourteen days from Monday is the 22nd, two days after the Big Game. A position group mostly out until the Big Game will have a major impact on the team practices and in-game performance.
Either way one slices it, this will have an impact on the game. And who knows, perhaps not enough players test negative in time for the Big Game. So yeah, a forfeit of the Big Game is definitely on the table.
I don’t think that is true. I believe those players would be held out of practice and not allowed to play in the game. What it does likely mean is we may not have a full roster for the remainder of the season.
If it is true that we are the only FBS program in the whole nation to have this occur, and if it is not merely a function of how often people are tested or some other local public health protocol, then it speaks very poorly to the culture and systems of our Football team. Wilcox needs to address this. No BS. Straight up. If the players aren't taking this seriously, getting tested, wearing masks, then it is on the coaches. On the coaches. On the coaches.
doing things like testing asymptomatic vaccinated individuals, specifically to keep case rates down. The Berkeley testing strategy is actually meant to detect cases.
From that statement, it's clear to me what an individual's responsibilities are if you're sick, having symptoms, or even think you might have symptoms: get tested, isolate, wear a mask indoors (in other words, keep your germs to yourself).
This is magnified in a setting such as a football team, where there is frequent contact with others in practice, in meetings, in the weight room, and outside of formal team settings such as living arrangements shared with teammates.
But kids are arrogant (invincibility aura) and athletes are often even more arrogant (I'm special; I can do what I want when I want).
Masking and social distancing needed to be enforced. The coaches and medical staff are supposed to have led that way in that regard. Clearly, they did not...or tried, got too much pushback, and gave up trying.
Someone at the top made that choice, and it's been reflected down through the team resulting in this spectaclar self-own on the football team's part.
It kind of amazes me that the AD would abandon regular testing in view of this. They seemed to be proceeding as though the NFL's protocols applied to them.
I don’t think any Pac 12 team played a full season of 8 games last year and if they did it would have only been 9 games because all OOC games were canceled.
I had forgotten about the OOC games being cancelled.
31 games were played, 12 were cancelled. Actually, according to the Pac-12 website one regular season OOC game was played - Colorado def. San Diego State, 20-10 (Nov. 28, in Boulder, CO).
That’s right! Ya the Buffs snuck in an OOC bc their opponent 1 week was was COVID’ed, as was SDSU’s…but early enough in the week that they could line something up.
I'm going to chalk this up to vaccine efficacy lowering over time. You are going to pick up more cases when that happens, even if the players didn't get seriously ill. That would square with so many of them being asymptomatic.
Yes, though if one infection got through, this is a group of people that simply have to spend a lot of time together. Seeing it spread among them is not surprising either way.
Perhaps this may account for some of the "upper body injuries" the team was reporting for random players throughout the season?
But to go further, if Wilcox is always worried about reporting details about player status so as to not give opponents an informational advantage, why couldn't he see the efficacy of actually keeping the players COVID-free as much as possible to keep a player in the lineup?
To summarize, one of the players got COVID, didn't get tested and/or isolate, and continued to hang around other players who were not masking/social distancing. Thus an outbreak occurred.
Seems that is what happened. For my daughters preschool, if a kid has a runny nose, cough or fever they must be picked up and can’t return to school until they produce a negative Covid test or if the parent doesn’t want to test them they can’t come back until they are symptom free and must be out for a minimum of 10 days.
If the coaching staff saw someone with symptoms even cold like symptoms they should have removed them from the team and had them tested immediately.
For one thing, this is only one side of the story. A reporter on Twitter is trying to stir up some trouble by saying we would have a different perception if Cal told their side. He hasn't backed that up at all, so I'm not going to link that until there's some detail.
According to the statement, someone was sick and neither tested nor stayed at home. We don't know for sure if this person showed up to an official Cal Football function where a coach should have intervened. It's *possible* the individual was removed from those meetings, but still hung out with other people in the program as friends outside of practice or meetings. It's possible the individual lives with other players and it spread there despite trying to isolate.
We don't have enough information to know for sure yet.
Students, Staff, and Faculty at UC Berkeley are required to fill out a Daily Symptom Screener to be on campus each day, and the questions ask about new symptoms such as runny nose, sore throat, etc., so it also means the person who was sick either wasn't filling out the screener (and there's lots of people not, that's another issue), or was lying when they did fill it out. They also are required to wear face coverings when inside all buildings, which sounds like was also not being done. This seems like poor compliance across the football team (and perhaps the larger Athletic Department, depending on if the non-compliance is more widespread). (https://coronavirus.berkeley.edu/campus-access/)
Who reviews those Daily Symptom Screeners (or DSSs)? What's the follow-up when someone gives an answer that they have COVID symptoms, has been in contact with someone who has COVID, or has tested positive for COVID?
At my employer, the unit supervisor is responsible for reviewing Symptoms Checks. If an employee answers "Yes" to any question to indicate symptoms, contact with a COVID patient, or a positive test, that employee is referred to a COVID hotline for further instructions.
Do Cal students, faculty, and staff get the same guidance? I'm not sure if they are given the reporting on the football teams recent travails.
True that we still have some gaps and you’re correct that the player could be living with other players and that’s how it spread.
I am not saying that the staff didn’t remove him from official Cal football functions, I’m saying it seems that player didn’t isolate at home and interacted with others.
Nowhere in SD23s comment did he say the player participated in official football activities, just that they didn’t isolate and it spread from there. That is what I am agreeing with.
I'm just focusing on the line that if "the coaching staff saw someone with symptoms even cold like symptoms they should have removed them". This is true, but we do not know for sure that a coach failed to do so. That's all that I'm saying.
I gotcha. That is true, we don’t know. I was assuming this because of how often coaches and players see each other during the season but it is possible that a coach didn’t actually see a player with cold like symptoms.
True. If this is all there is to it, then it makes no sense for Wilcox, Garbers, Bequette, and other players to be so upset. There has to be more that's going on.
It’s been said over and over but I’ll say it again. 99% vaccination rate and now 44 individuals in the program reported as COVID positive. There is no way you have that many break through cases based the statistics reported to date. Unless maybe they have a newer strain than the Delta. And what happened to the players that initially tested positive followed by a negative test, were they cleared, were they tested further, are they being quarantined??? Regardless of who’s at fault this whole shit show just doesn’t pass the smell test!
Could be a mixture of waning vaccine efficacy (it's almost six months out), large groups clustering, and poor indoor policy (no masking indoors and lots of yelling with close group communication). A few symptomatic dudes in that situation and you have outbreak conditions.
Let's be clear. Vaccines protect you from SERIOUS COVID symptoms. They do not mean you will never get COVID ever again.
I think I read somewhere at some point that sexual assault rates at UC Berkeley were higher than at other universities because Cal was actually putting in place improved policies to better report sexual assault on campus. The result was that, statistically, it appeared that UC Berkeley had a accurately reported higher rate of sexual assault versus, say, a school like Baylor with a dramatically underreported rate.
It feels like we are seeing kind of a similar thing here with Covid where maybe Cal and the regional public health community are striving to do the right thing, but schools elsewhere may be under-reporting. We have a university which is part of a larger community where more strict protocols and enforcement of public health measures are in place. Well, when you have that of course you are going to uncover more Covid. And when one unvcovers more Covid then one is forced to deal with the consequence of uncovering more Covid. And that's where Cal seems to be.
Full vaccination should (is supposed to) result in testing reverting to negative quickly.
If they are testing daily, there should be relief. It would be interesting to know the nature of the test since we know PCR can be run with extra cycles and detect DNA fragments that do not indicate transmission risk.
Here's a theory to consider... since it seems lack of testing masked a problem until team wide testing was done, it's entirely reasonable to suggest that other teams are likely in the same boat (having lots of unknown COVID positive players). Which would also suggest that a significant contingent of Cal players may have gotten COVID from game-time interaction with other teams. In this case, likely from Oregon State (due to the timing).
They probably caught it from each other, but I think it's very likely other teams are in the same boat and don't know because they don't have to test as much as Cal.
It's actually plausible if the most commonly used vaccine was JnJ. Looks like after 6 months the efficacy against infection drops a lot with that one, though it still holds up well against death or serious illness -- you might get COVID, but likely won't have severe symptoms.
That would actually be pretty consistent with the results we've seen on the team. A bunch of positive tests but no one hospitalized.
The J&J gap should close with the booster (if it gets folded into mandates). But, yeah, not the ideal vaccine if you're trying to suppress positives instead of just trying to reduce serious disease.
Would be a perfectly fine choice for college students if you remove the team sport aspect.
To me it also raises the question of how valid "case" measures are in populations that are highly vaccinated. Not disputing what CoB and UC's policies were when the season started, but if vaccine efficacy is going to wane against infection while staying strong against severe symptoms (and I think this happens with Pfizer/Moderna too, though maybe not as much) then case rates could rise without really threatening hospital capacity or death rates.
I don't have all the answers, but I'm getting the sense that public-health expectations might have to be re-calibrated there.
Another observed problem - mask mandates become stringent when the numbers of cases (and hospitalizations and deaths) rise, cases fall, mask mandates are loosened, then cases rise, mandates are tightened. Rinse, repeat.
We're entering into another cycle of cases rising and mask mandates being tightened up again. The X factor is the vaccination rate. It is creeping up, but it's not nearly enough to confer herd immunity. As long as there is a significant group that refuses to vaccinate, we will have the cycle described earlier.
PROBLEM: health officials seem to respond to pressure to loosen mask mandates when cases fall off.
I'm feeling like case rates are maybe not the right metric anymore. Used to be that a rise in case rates would definitely be followed by hospitalizations and deaths, but that may not be true given variable vaccination rates. Again, not a public health expert, just seems to be a reasonable conclusion given how the vaccines perform.
One possibility is that the vaccines wear off so much as to be nearly ineffective and we all have to get vaccinated on an annual basis. This was suggested sometime during the Spring (which now seems a long, long time ago). Given recent CDC advice supporting boosters I think this is the likely path (annual vaccines) going forward.
As long as there are jerks who do not want to be vaccinated for whatever *non-medical* reason COVID will be a thing in our daily lives.
Yeah, J&J is great for young and healthy people, which the vast majority of student athletes are but it is the organized athletic part that makes it less desirable if you’re trying to reduce/suppress positives.
Sheesh. The latest details, and this statement, are making some of the takes from the past few days (mine included) age like milk...
Any hope of salvaging this season is dead. Get the youngins some reps (whoever is able to suit up that is), and onward to next season. Unless UW poaches our coach that is (where the hell did that come from? Is that even in the realm of possibility?)
The Bear is dead. Long live the Bear! (totally stole that from the other thread; going to use it forever)
Happy to be imitated. Yes, I've never said this before, but it seems so damn fitting to the dumpster fire of Football and Basketball to say: The Bear is dead, long live the Bear!
Thanks Avi for all your digging into the COVID protocols of UC Berkeley, City of berkeley and reaching out!
If they really have to show 14 days with less than or only 2 positives it doesn't seem like the Big Game can be played? And if Dec. 4 is already committed to USC would that mean Cal forfeits the Big Game?
I think you're misinterpreting the Berkeley Health message. TESTING must continue twice per week until fewer than 3 positives over 14 days; after that, it's testing once per week until there are zero cases for 14 days.
ISOLATION, on the other hand is for 10 days following onset of symptoms, AND at least 24 hours have passed since resolution of fever, AND other symptoms have improved.
Knowlton said that several players were added to the list on Monday and their addition was "mostly" from one position group. Ten days from Monday is the 18th, leaving those guys 1 practice day ~ if they test negative. Fourteen days from Monday is the 22nd, two days after the Big Game. A position group mostly out until the Big Game will have a major impact on the team practices and in-game performance.
Either way one slices it, this will have an impact on the game. And who knows, perhaps not enough players test negative in time for the Big Game. So yeah, a forfeit of the Big Game is definitely on the table.
I don’t think that is true. I believe those players would be held out of practice and not allowed to play in the game. What it does likely mean is we may not have a full roster for the remainder of the season.
Agreed. The reporting here is so much better than any other source.
If it is true that we are the only FBS program in the whole nation to have this occur, and if it is not merely a function of how often people are tested or some other local public health protocol, then it speaks very poorly to the culture and systems of our Football team. Wilcox needs to address this. No BS. Straight up. If the players aren't taking this seriously, getting tested, wearing masks, then it is on the coaches. On the coaches. On the coaches.
It's very likely other programs have had similar outbreaks but are not testing team-wide like Cal is.
My guess is that other teams aren't
doing things like testing asymptomatic vaccinated individuals, specifically to keep case rates down. The Berkeley testing strategy is actually meant to detect cases.
LMAO, ty I needed a bit of humor.....hahahahahaha
From that statement, it's clear to me what an individual's responsibilities are if you're sick, having symptoms, or even think you might have symptoms: get tested, isolate, wear a mask indoors (in other words, keep your germs to yourself).
This is magnified in a setting such as a football team, where there is frequent contact with others in practice, in meetings, in the weight room, and outside of formal team settings such as living arrangements shared with teammates.
But kids are arrogant (invincibility aura) and athletes are often even more arrogant (I'm special; I can do what I want when I want).
Is it any wonder this happened?
Masking and social distancing needed to be enforced. The coaches and medical staff are supposed to have led that way in that regard. Clearly, they did not...or tried, got too much pushback, and gave up trying.
Someone at the top made that choice, and it's been reflected down through the team resulting in this spectaclar self-own on the football team's part.
Yup.
It kind of amazes me that the AD would abandon regular testing in view of this. They seemed to be proceeding as though the NFL's protocols applied to them.
It amazes me that with the experience of last year that the AD did not mandate a rigorous set of rules regarding testing and prevention.
Cal only played 4 games last year, right? Because of COVID 8 games were lost.
I don’t think any Pac 12 team played a full season of 8 games last year and if they did it would have only been 9 games because all OOC games were canceled.
I had forgotten about the OOC games being cancelled.
31 games were played, 12 were cancelled. Actually, according to the Pac-12 website one regular season OOC game was played - Colorado def. San Diego State, 20-10 (Nov. 28, in Boulder, CO).
That’s right! Ya the Buffs snuck in an OOC bc their opponent 1 week was was COVID’ed, as was SDSU’s…but early enough in the week that they could line something up.
To be honest, I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner in the season. The shocking thing to me is it didn’t happen during our delta peak.
I'm going to chalk this up to vaccine efficacy lowering over time. You are going to pick up more cases when that happens, even if the players didn't get seriously ill. That would square with so many of them being asymptomatic.
I also think people simply become less diligent overall.
Yes, though if one infection got through, this is a group of people that simply have to spend a lot of time together. Seeing it spread among them is not surprising either way.
Perhaps this may account for some of the "upper body injuries" the team was reporting for random players throughout the season?
But to go further, if Wilcox is always worried about reporting details about player status so as to not give opponents an informational advantage, why couldn't he see the efficacy of actually keeping the players COVID-free as much as possible to keep a player in the lineup?
To summarize, one of the players got COVID, didn't get tested and/or isolate, and continued to hang around other players who were not masking/social distancing. Thus an outbreak occurred.
Seems that is what happened. For my daughters preschool, if a kid has a runny nose, cough or fever they must be picked up and can’t return to school until they produce a negative Covid test or if the parent doesn’t want to test them they can’t come back until they are symptom free and must be out for a minimum of 10 days.
If the coaching staff saw someone with symptoms even cold like symptoms they should have removed them from the team and had them tested immediately.
There are still some gaps in the story.
For one thing, this is only one side of the story. A reporter on Twitter is trying to stir up some trouble by saying we would have a different perception if Cal told their side. He hasn't backed that up at all, so I'm not going to link that until there's some detail.
According to the statement, someone was sick and neither tested nor stayed at home. We don't know for sure if this person showed up to an official Cal Football function where a coach should have intervened. It's *possible* the individual was removed from those meetings, but still hung out with other people in the program as friends outside of practice or meetings. It's possible the individual lives with other players and it spread there despite trying to isolate.
We don't have enough information to know for sure yet.
Students, Staff, and Faculty at UC Berkeley are required to fill out a Daily Symptom Screener to be on campus each day, and the questions ask about new symptoms such as runny nose, sore throat, etc., so it also means the person who was sick either wasn't filling out the screener (and there's lots of people not, that's another issue), or was lying when they did fill it out. They also are required to wear face coverings when inside all buildings, which sounds like was also not being done. This seems like poor compliance across the football team (and perhaps the larger Athletic Department, depending on if the non-compliance is more widespread). (https://coronavirus.berkeley.edu/campus-access/)
This still doesn't answer the question of how there were 0 outbreaks at other schools with much much much less guidelines.
Who reviews those Daily Symptom Screeners (or DSSs)? What's the follow-up when someone gives an answer that they have COVID symptoms, has been in contact with someone who has COVID, or has tested positive for COVID?
At my employer, the unit supervisor is responsible for reviewing Symptoms Checks. If an employee answers "Yes" to any question to indicate symptoms, contact with a COVID patient, or a positive test, that employee is referred to a COVID hotline for further instructions.
Do Cal students, faculty, and staff get the same guidance? I'm not sure if they are given the reporting on the football teams recent travails.
* team's
True that we still have some gaps and you’re correct that the player could be living with other players and that’s how it spread.
I am not saying that the staff didn’t remove him from official Cal football functions, I’m saying it seems that player didn’t isolate at home and interacted with others.
Nowhere in SD23s comment did he say the player participated in official football activities, just that they didn’t isolate and it spread from there. That is what I am agreeing with.
I'm just focusing on the line that if "the coaching staff saw someone with symptoms even cold like symptoms they should have removed them". This is true, but we do not know for sure that a coach failed to do so. That's all that I'm saying.
I gotcha. That is true, we don’t know. I was assuming this because of how often coaches and players see each other during the season but it is possible that a coach didn’t actually see a player with cold like symptoms.
True. If this is all there is to it, then it makes no sense for Wilcox, Garbers, Bequette, and other players to be so upset. There has to be more that's going on.
It’s been said over and over but I’ll say it again. 99% vaccination rate and now 44 individuals in the program reported as COVID positive. There is no way you have that many break through cases based the statistics reported to date. Unless maybe they have a newer strain than the Delta. And what happened to the players that initially tested positive followed by a negative test, were they cleared, were they tested further, are they being quarantined??? Regardless of who’s at fault this whole shit show just doesn’t pass the smell test!
Could be a mixture of waning vaccine efficacy (it's almost six months out), large groups clustering, and poor indoor policy (no masking indoors and lots of yelling with close group communication). A few symptomatic dudes in that situation and you have outbreak conditions.
Let's be clear. Vaccines protect you from SERIOUS COVID symptoms. They do not mean you will never get COVID ever again.
this...I really wish we would hear a response to this point
Did the players have a mass slumber party in an unventilated room or something?
I think I read somewhere at some point that sexual assault rates at UC Berkeley were higher than at other universities because Cal was actually putting in place improved policies to better report sexual assault on campus. The result was that, statistically, it appeared that UC Berkeley had a accurately reported higher rate of sexual assault versus, say, a school like Baylor with a dramatically underreported rate.
It feels like we are seeing kind of a similar thing here with Covid where maybe Cal and the regional public health community are striving to do the right thing, but schools elsewhere may be under-reporting. We have a university which is part of a larger community where more strict protocols and enforcement of public health measures are in place. Well, when you have that of course you are going to uncover more Covid. And when one unvcovers more Covid then one is forced to deal with the consequence of uncovering more Covid. And that's where Cal seems to be.
It's good that people are finally speaking up. I wonder if Chase got all the answers he was asking for.
This whole thing is a fucking mess.
Whoa.
Oski Wow Wow!
Full vaccination should (is supposed to) result in testing reverting to negative quickly.
If they are testing daily, there should be relief. It would be interesting to know the nature of the test since we know PCR can be run with extra cycles and detect DNA fragments that do not indicate transmission risk.
This is now part of the national non-sports news, Washington Post has an article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/11/10/cal-usc-postponed-covid/
That author has such a fantastic porno name.
Here's a theory to consider... since it seems lack of testing masked a problem until team wide testing was done, it's entirely reasonable to suggest that other teams are likely in the same boat (having lots of unknown COVID positive players). Which would also suggest that a significant contingent of Cal players may have gotten COVID from game-time interaction with other teams. In this case, likely from Oregon State (due to the timing).
Thoughts?
"masked" was a poor word choice since masking means something notable in this arena. "hid" would have been better.
That's it! Mystery solved...
They probably caught it from each other, but I think it's very likely other teams are in the same boat and don't know because they don't have to test as much as Cal.
Thanks for the reporting! My question is, if 99% of the program is vaccinated, are there that many break-through cases?
It's actually plausible if the most commonly used vaccine was JnJ. Looks like after 6 months the efficacy against infection drops a lot with that one, though it still holds up well against death or serious illness -- you might get COVID, but likely won't have severe symptoms.
That would actually be pretty consistent with the results we've seen on the team. A bunch of positive tests but no one hospitalized.
The J&J gap should close with the booster (if it gets folded into mandates). But, yeah, not the ideal vaccine if you're trying to suppress positives instead of just trying to reduce serious disease.
Would be a perfectly fine choice for college students if you remove the team sport aspect.
To me it also raises the question of how valid "case" measures are in populations that are highly vaccinated. Not disputing what CoB and UC's policies were when the season started, but if vaccine efficacy is going to wane against infection while staying strong against severe symptoms (and I think this happens with Pfizer/Moderna too, though maybe not as much) then case rates could rise without really threatening hospital capacity or death rates.
I don't have all the answers, but I'm getting the sense that public-health expectations might have to be re-calibrated there.
Another observed problem - mask mandates become stringent when the numbers of cases (and hospitalizations and deaths) rise, cases fall, mask mandates are loosened, then cases rise, mandates are tightened. Rinse, repeat.
We're entering into another cycle of cases rising and mask mandates being tightened up again. The X factor is the vaccination rate. It is creeping up, but it's not nearly enough to confer herd immunity. As long as there is a significant group that refuses to vaccinate, we will have the cycle described earlier.
PROBLEM: health officials seem to respond to pressure to loosen mask mandates when cases fall off.
I'm feeling like case rates are maybe not the right metric anymore. Used to be that a rise in case rates would definitely be followed by hospitalizations and deaths, but that may not be true given variable vaccination rates. Again, not a public health expert, just seems to be a reasonable conclusion given how the vaccines perform.
One possibility is that the vaccines wear off so much as to be nearly ineffective and we all have to get vaccinated on an annual basis. This was suggested sometime during the Spring (which now seems a long, long time ago). Given recent CDC advice supporting boosters I think this is the likely path (annual vaccines) going forward.
As long as there are jerks who do not want to be vaccinated for whatever *non-medical* reason COVID will be a thing in our daily lives.
Yeah, J&J is great for young and healthy people, which the vast majority of student athletes are but it is the organized athletic part that makes it less desirable if you’re trying to reduce/suppress positives.
Sheesh. The latest details, and this statement, are making some of the takes from the past few days (mine included) age like milk...
Any hope of salvaging this season is dead. Get the youngins some reps (whoever is able to suit up that is), and onward to next season. Unless UW poaches our coach that is (where the hell did that come from? Is that even in the realm of possibility?)
The Bear is dead. Long live the Bear! (totally stole that from the other thread; going to use it forever)
Happy to be imitated. Yes, I've never said this before, but it seems so damn fitting to the dumpster fire of Football and Basketball to say: The Bear is dead, long live the Bear!
I also loved this phrase. Definitely adding it to my stable of Cal sports-related expressions.
Wilcox getting what would effectively be a promotion to a better program at Washington would be confusing to me.
Taco said it came from Wilner?
Yup, it is on his twitter account.
Good ol' Wilner Shakespeare.