CHENNAI: Early this week, there was heightened anxiety and a number of worried faces inside the National Centre of Excellence at Bengaluru. The source of the worry was a significant number of positive cases among the men’s hockey team, including a few of the support staff.
It got to such a stage where, at least for sometime, the ones who had tested positive were sent to isolation while the ones untouched by the invisible virus began training in groups of six according to Covid-19 protocol laid down by the Sports Authority of India (SAI).
As reported by this newspaper, the SAI, already reeling under pressure for as a number of athletes had already tested positive inside the Green Zone a place exclusively meant for athletes and their closest contacts — ordered immediate retests. The SAI officials were quietly confident that they were all false positives and hoped for a more positive outcome.
It’s also understood that a few of the players who had had false positives were vaccinated days before. Even the athletes, who returned positive after the first lot of nine. However, on Thursday and Friday, SAI breathed a sigh of relief when all barring one returned negative on the RT-PCR retests.
The SAI acknowledged this sequence of positive-negative-positive-negative tests in a press release on Friday. “21 out of 22 athletes who tested Covid + return negative on retest,” the body said. “Health of a positive athlete being monitored.”
What happens at the Olympics?
This brings to the fore is not just the spate of false positives at the NCOE in Bangalore but also the elephant in the room: what happens when athletes return false positive hours before their matches at the Tokyo Games? The International Olympic Committee (IOC), in the playbook for athletes, will first test athletes using the Rapid Antigen Test (RAT). Now, RAT has a lower sensitivity than RT-PCR that’s why the latter is considered the gold standard.
However, if RAT throws up a false positive or if it’s inconclusive, the athlete will have to undergo further tests to eliminate the possibility. The athlete is immediately taken to a Covid-19 Clinic in the Village for a confirmatory PCR test via nasopharyngeal method. This result takes about three to five hours. That’s more than enough time for matches, perhaps even medal ones, to finish. It’s expected that the IOC will come out with a final version in June.