NBA to primarily use rapid tests for COVID

The NBA is one of the first sports leagues to start using rapid tests for concussion prevention. Rapid tests are a quick and easy way to diagnose concussions before they become serious, saving players from long-term effects like dementia.

The how often are nba players tested for covid in the bubble is a question that has been asked many times before. It’s important to know how often NBA players are tested for Covid because of the potential health risks associated with it.

Given the NBA’s high vaccination rate, the league’s primary method of COVID-19 detection this season will be through designated team officials — primarily members of the medical staff — who will use small, at-home, molecular-based testing devices that can provide results in as little as 20 minutes.

In many cases, the NBA will continue to depend on lab-based testing, albeit not to the same extent as last season, when hundreds of outside experts, some of whom were embedded with teams, would collect and carry samples to labs throughout the nation on a regular basis.

In the Orlando bubble in 2020, the league started utilizing these FDA-approved molecular diagnostic testing devices, which are approximately the size of a deck of cards, as a complement to other COVID-19 tests. During the 2020-21 NBA season, five NBA teams utilized the devices as part of a trial program.

However, in 2021-22, the gadgets, which were created by the San Diego-based firm Cue, will become the league standard, with each club having up to 24 of them. Cue will also give the gadgets to NBA officials, who will be tested by the NBA’s referee operations department.

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Ayub Khattak, Cue’s CEO and co-founder, claimed the gadgets have been utilized by sports leagues, as well as over 2,000 schools and other institutions in 16 states. According to a Mayo Clinic research, the devices, which use a nose swab to gather data, provide findings that are 97.8% correct.

“Our test is extremely precise,” Khattak said to ESPN. “False positives are, of course, possible in every scenario. But there’s another advantage to being able to obtain results faster. You’re not going to obsess about a false positive for two days before getting your next test result.”

Any further testing requirements that may emerge, such as verifying a positive test on one of the rapid-response devices, have been sent to NBA clubs to work with a local lab.

Unvaccinated players will be checked daily and perhaps twice on some days, according to NBA health and safety standards. According to a league spokesman, most team personnel and referees are required to be vaccinated, and almost 96 percent of players are inoculated.

The NBA will cooperate with clubs to fulfill testing requirements if they wish to check every player and staff member every day, but the frequency of testing for vaccinated players and employees is unknown.

Each team has a testing officer who is in charge of organizing and supervising the team’s testing. The officers will mostly come from the medical or sports training staffs of each team. The findings of the tests are stored in a secure, cloud-based dashboard. Each team’s designated health care personnel will have access to the data, while the league’s player health group will have access to leaguewide data.

An Eastern Conference general manager remarked of the gadgets, “It really appeals to me. It’s extremely practical.”

“I believe it’ll be huge,” one Western Conference general manager, who is acquainted with the gadgets, said. “It certainly reduces the necessity for [other experts] to be there.”

The NBA primarily relied on BioReference Laboratories experts to perform the majority of their COVID-19 testing last season, especially in the Orlando bubble.

In 2020-21, BioReference has approximately 400 NBA-focused employees throughout the nation, with about ten of them working on-site with each of the 30 clubs, with one of them serving as point man, frequently going to every home and away game.

Some of the BioReference employees were so ingrained in the teams that they were photographed with them every year.

The nba covid vaccine policy is a decision that the NBA made to primarily use rapid tests for COVID.

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