Daily testing gives Big Ten confidence
Virus racks campuses but football seen as safer
MADISON – Pick any school in the Big Ten Conference and you’ll find students being quarantined and opting to return home and chancellors deciding to suspend in-person classes.
All because of COVID-19.
Yet Big Ten football is back. How do the individuals who helped the league do a 180 and vote to start playing football next month feel about the way that looks?
Both Wisconsin athletic director Al
varez and Northwestern president Morton Schapiro stressed the safe environment they believe can be created for athletes as the No. 1 factor.
Alvarez is the chairperson on the league’s return to competition task force; Schapiro is the chairperson of the Council of Presidents and Chancellors, which voted unanimously to play football beginning next month.
For context, UW officials have quarantined student in two campus dorms and paused in-person classes through next Friday.
UW officials reported 127 new positive tests from campus sites Thursday, 125 students and two staffers. Fifty-seven students and six employees tested positive from off-campus sites.
The rate of positive tests on campus Thursday was 7.3%; the seven-day rate of positive tests on campus is 8.3%.
Northwestern is not allowing firstand second-year students on its campus.
“Obviously it concerns all of us,” Alvarez said. “It concerns me. But they’re going to test daily. And our players for the past month, up until this past weekend, have been working out. And anything that has occurred at our facility and in our stadium … we’ve been able to control.
“Now as we move forward (with) daily testing, that makes me feel very much at ease. Quite frankly, the medical questions that were out there? Without them being answered, there’s no way that we could put our student-athletes back on the field. But now we have answers.
“In the end, that is the reason we moved forward. The medical questions were answered by our doctors.”
Schapiro noted Northwestern has 968 students on campus.
“The feeling was that if we could play football safely and the Big Ten was going to provide the costs of daily testing and we were able to do it,” Schapiro said, “I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t go forward.
“But I did grapple with that, thinking that part of the campus is closed and maybe we shouldn’t play football until campus is open.
“But at the end of the day I found the arguments that we could do it safely … there is no reason not to go ahead and do it.”