OSU Head Coach Ryan Day, Director of Athletics Gene Smith and team physician Jim Borchers met with reporters today to shed light on the cancellation of the football game with Illinois and the future of the football schedule.
According to Borchers, the B1G has two guideline thresholds to determine whether to shut down a program. The first is that a program should have less-than 7.5% positive tests in it’s Tier I population which includes all players, coaches and support personnel. That population numbers 170 in the OSU football program. OSU exceeded the 13-person limit set by this standard. He did not reveal the actual number of positive tests.
Borchers also reported that the COVID cases were not in clusters i.e. at certain position groups or within any other specific segment of the Tier 1 population such as coaches, managers, etc. Instead the positives were random throughout the population.
As to the future of the remaining schedule which includes Michigan State and Michigan, Smith said that it is too early to tell whether OSU will be able to play those games because there is not yet enough data. If the number of positive cases continues to rise, then those games are in danger of cancellation. If it does not those game could still yet be played.
Players who have already tested positive must now undergo a mandatory 10-day isolation and then the return to competition protocol which lasts seven to 10 days.
According to Borchers, prior to this outbreak OSU had had zero positive tests.
The names of the individuals who tested positive were not divulged due to privacy concerns.
Did Dr Borchers say how many cycles were used in the PCR testing protocol? Did he say anything about the symptoms that are being displayed by those that tested positive?
That’s really sad,looks looks like Indiana will play Northwestern for Big championship