Two weeks from opener, Gamecocks hit crucial point as it relates to COVID-19
Saturday quietly marked an important moment for South Carolina football’s season-opener against Tennessee.
While college football teams in the ACC, Big 12 and other conferences returned to the field for the first time during the global coronavirus pandemic this weekend, the Gamecocks still have two weeks left before Sept. 26, when they’ll finally kick things off against the Volunteers.
But that two-week window matters significantly more in the age of COVID-19 — that’s the length of time any player deemed to be a high-risk contact with an infected individual must quarantine.
High-risk contacts, even more so than positive COVID tests, can decimate a roster. Tennessee itself had to cancel a scrimmage because so many players were missing, including more than two dozen due to contact tracing, per CBS Sports. This weekend, Georgia Southern was down 33 players, the majority because of contact tracing, according to a report from WJCL.
And if any Gamecock is deemed a high-risk contact between now and Sept. 26, they’ll have to miss the opener.
USC coach Will Muschamp said Sunday that the program has two active cases of the virus, along with nine other players out because of contact tracing. Four or five of those contacts, however, will finish their quarantine and return to practice Monday, Muschamp said.
The others currently in quarantine will presumably return sometime before the opener if they don’t develop symptoms. As the Gamecocks start to implement their game plan for Tennessee, they could miss valuable practices that impact preparation.
It all has an effect, Muschamp said.
“As far as our standards are concerned and our policies in the state of South Carolina, contact tracing is a 14-day quarantine, regardless if you can test back in, if you can produce multiple negative tests after maybe a false positive,” Muschamp said. “And that’s not ... other places, other schools, other states are not doing the same thing. If you’re able to re-enter off negative tests at five to seven days, that’s a huge difference. That’s a week as far as that’s concerned. And so, again, we got to continue to look at that, we need to be uniform as far as the league is concerned on that, in my opinion.”
The requirements put in place in August by the SEC Return to Activity and Medical Guidance Task Force do state that all teams in the conference must quarantine high-risk contacts for 14 days. The requirements also say schools may test quarantined individuals, but such tests can’t replace or shorten quarantine periods.
The CDC recommends 14 days of quarantine for those who are in close contact, defined as spending 15 or more minutes within six feet of an infected person with no mask. For those who are actually infected but are asymptomatic, the CDC recommends 10 days of isolation.
But contact tracing isn’t always an exact science, and “clinical judgments” will have to be made throughout the season, experts told the Associated Press, especially if players don’t fully disclose contacts because they don’t want to miss games.
In the NBA’s “bubble” in Orlando, quarantine rules vary depending on whether a player has received approval to leave or not. In the NFL, players were cleared to leave quarantine after a rash of tests were deemed to be false positives.
At the University of South Carolina, there’s not much Muschamp can do about the quarantine rules in place. But at least in the case of the all-important quarterback position, he said, the coaching staff has arranged it so that if one QB is ruled out for a positive test or contact tracing, the rest of the room won’t be taken out too. In addition to social distancing and mask wearing in the position room, none of the quarterbacks live together, one of the most common ways for high-risk contacts to occur.
Gamecocks’ 2020 football schedule
Sept. 26: home vs. Tennessee, 7:30 pm (SEC Network)
Oct. 3: at Florida, noon (ESPN)
Oct. 10: at Vanderbilt
Oct. 17: home vs. Auburn
Oct. 24: at LSU
Oct. 31: OPEN
Nov. 7: home vs. Texas A&M, 7:30 pm (ESPN or SEC Network)
Nov. 14: at Ole Miss
Nov. 21: home vs. Missouri
Nov. 28: home vs. Georgia
Dec. 5: at Kentucky
