Chicago Bears get COVID-19 scare

The Chicago Bears got a scare on Sunday morning.

Early this morning there was some oddity to the ebb and flow of the ordinary Chicago Bears Sunday training session. Brad Biggs of the Chicago Tribune tweeted he had received an email from the Bears at 7:33 A.M. approving his access to the Bears training camp practice this morning. However, at 8:05 A.M. Biggs was greeted at the front of Halas Hall by a security guard that stated there would be no media access today. Weird, right?

Well, things started to get a bit more strange as this news started to make waves through the Chicago media. What could have happened? For all intents and purposes, the Bears had a good controlled team scrimmage yesterday, which left members of the roster healthy. What could be going on up at Halas Hall?

Rumors started to churn online, as the NFL Network started to share more details of what was occurring around the league, but what really was going on in Chicago? The football world was fixated on Twitter until the league released this statement…

“Saturday’s daily COVID testing returned several positive tests from each of the clubs serviced by the same laboratory in New Jersey. We are working with out 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.”

Then the Chicago Bears organization compounded that statement by releasing one of their own, “This morning we learned yesterday’s COVID-19 testing identified nine players/staff as positive,” which also added, “We followed additional NFL-NFLPA testing protocol and confirmed all nine results as false positives. Out of an abundance of caution, we postponed this morning’s practice to this afternoon.”

Whew…  I’m sure fans, league officials and players everywhere just let out a huge sigh of relief. With that being said, this “blunder” does raise some curiosity for me. Earlier in the offseason, the Bears brass stated that their COVID-19 testing would be analyzed at a lab in Minnesota. However, the league has stated that these positive tests came from a lab in New Jersey? That doesn’t add up at all.

Either way, the Bears have pushed back their practice from its original time slot of 9:20 A.M. to 1:30 P.M. this afternoon where Head Coach, Matt Nagy will address the media. It is worth mentioning that the Bears did not have a single player on it’s COVID-19 reserve list this week. While this was a definite scare, I think everyone is just happy that football can continue on as it has the past few weeks.