The NFL is battling the latest COVID-19 surge with an understanding that symptomatic individuals are driving transmission within the team environment, chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills said Thursday, with no indications of asymptomatic spread.
That position represents a significant departure from the pandemic-long stance of public health authorities, who have warned about the possibility of individuals spreading the virus without being aware they are infected.
Sills first told the NFL Network that the league has not seen verifiable asymptomatic spread this season, and later fleshed out his point in an interview with ESPN.
"I think all of our concern about [asymptomatic spread] has been going down based on what we've been seeing throughout the past several months," Sills told ESPN. "We've got our hands full with symptomatic people. Can I tell you tonight that there has never been a case when someone without symptoms passed it on to someone else? No, of course I can't say that. But what I can say to you is that I think it's a very, very tiny fraction of the overall problem, if it exists at all.
"Clearly if you want to look at the overall pattern and concern about transmission, it is not being driven by people who have no idea that they are infected and they are infecting scores of others. This is being driven by people with symptoms and the exposures during that symptomatic period."
In response to the Omicron variant, the NFL and NFL Players Association agreed last week to halt weekly testing on vaccinated players and begin random testing of a sample across teams and positions. Vaccinated players who report symptoms are required to be tested, and unvaccinated players continue to be tested daily. The NFL is still performing 1,000 tests per day for players and staff, Sills said.
