The Diamondbacks have been among the teams who have been most impacted by COVID-19 cases, with multiple players testing positive over the last few weeks. That list added another name today, as manager Torey Lovullo told reporters (including The Athletic’s Zach Buchanan) that another player on the D’Backs 40-man roster has tested positive.
It remains to be seen if that player’s identity will become public knowledge, given the league policies against revealing COVID-19 cases unless the player gives his consent. We have already learned that Silvino Bracho, Seth Beer, Junior Guerra, and Kole Calhoun are among the D’Backs players who tested positive, and the good news is that the latter three players have since tested negative and are at Summer Camp. (Bracho’s status is unknown, though he wasn’t expected to be in camp anyway after being placed on the 60-day injured list following a setback in his recovery from Tommy John surgery.)
Calhoun discussed his return with Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic and other reporters, saying he was mostly asymptomatic — perhaps due to some hypochondria, as Piecoro writes that Calhoun “believes that at one point he managed to trick himself into thinking there was something wrong with his sense of smell.” The lack of symptoms underlined Calhoun’s confusion about his health, as he received alternating results on a number of different COVID-19 tests.
Before posting the two negative tests required by MLB protocols to return to camp, Calhoun said his previous tests went “positive, negative, positive, negative, positive, negative….[The doctor] said at the end of an infection they’re finding some people who still show up positive. It’s a matter of the sample that they get and did the virus attach itself to those cells.”
While circumstances like Calhoun’s are rather rare, it still underlines the difficulty that Major League Baseball (and society at large) will have in properly determining whether or not individuals are completely free and clear of the virus, given all that is still unknown about COVID-19. As it pertains to the 2020 season, the nightmare scenario would be for a player to deliver a multiple negative test results but still be an asymptomatic carrier, thus running the risk of unknowingly infecting numerous teammates, coaches, and opponents.
In terms of being ready for the start of the season, Calhoun said “I don’t feel like I’m too far behind,” so there’s a chance he could line up as Arizona’s right fielder on Opening Day. Calhoun signed a two-year, $16MM free agent deal with the Diamondbacks over the winter, though he’ll only receive a prorated portion of the $6MM salary he was originally slated to receive in 2020.
Starling Marte was also at Arizona’s camp on Friday, after missing the previous four days for an undisclosed reason. Amidst coronavirus speculation, Marte told Buchanan and other reporters that the absence was due to “waiting for results” from a test, and Marte was cleared to participate once those results finally arrived.
jeez these tests are a mess
They really are
false negatives are much more common than false negatives.
Degradation of the sample, an incorrectly obtained sample(possibly not using the swab correctly), etc… can all cause a false negative. Or an error while inputting the sample to be tested.
If someone has multiple tests and tests positive more than once, that is a clear sign they actually did have the virus.
how are false negatives more common than false negatives?
They’re not, at least not “much more common.”
You can test positive well after the virus has degraded. Many of the supposed “new cases” we hear reported are constant re-tests of a formerly positive person, or a continued positive.
It’s almost always wrongly reported. We report “new cases” when we should be reporting “positive tests.” These positive tests include re-tests and false positives. At what percentage, well, that never gets reported, so we just don’t know.
meant to say more common than false positives.
I don’t know if it’s been covered in another article or not but why aren’t they using that test Abbott (unsure of spelling) came out with months ago? I thought it was a machine that gave COVID results in 15 minutes and was basically portable thus it could be used at the baseball facilities. I saw it demonstrated on a news channel and it was quick.It was the same machine they quickly test for the flu in thousands of hospitals and doctors offices. Just don’t understand why if this type of testing is available why are they mailing and waiting for results. Anybody know about this?
I remember awhile back some studies showed the saliva test was not as accurate. I think they said it was in between like 80-90% (could be better now), compared to the 98.5% of a nasal swab. Just think if you test 1000 people for a bubble, and 100+ could possibly sneak through with false negatives. Since this is more long term exposure, compared to entry for a single event, I think they’re taking more precautions to try to keep players off the IL. I think some entities are doing saliva test once or twice a day, but still doing a nasal the beginning of each week.
There’s a couple of reasons.
That ‘machine’ wasn’t actually a new machine. It was a COVID-19 test for a portable testing machine that Abbott already produced. There are only so many of them in the US and Abbott can only produce so many. I believe the total number of machines was around 18,000-20,000 range.
In addition the ‘test kits’ that they are using on those machines are for one sample at a time. Abbott ‘ramped up’ production and was making 50,000 test kits per day. That would mean EACH MACHINE would get about 2.5 tests per day.
So it’s not a really viable option for conducting many tests.
My heart goes out to Starling Marte after recently losing his wife. The man has been through hell.
How are they going to deal with the real possibility that one team loses a LOT more players than another team? I mean look at this from state to state, all sorts of different curves. Expect the same to happen across different teams over the next three plus months.