The NBA funds a new COIVD19 test that is a game changer
Dan Wetzel explains how the NBA funded a new COVID19 test that will be a game changer.
Video Transcript
DAN WETZEL: The NBA, the National Basketball Association, may have saved us, because they-- a guy named Robby Sikka up in the Minnesota Timberwolves, a physician for them and a performance-- vice president of performance for the Timberwolves, read this paper that Yale had out there about this. It is not brand-new technology. Other schools are employing it, including, I think, Illinois, Rutgers.
But basically saw it, got the NBA and the NBA Players Association to fund the study with the idea that it could help colleges be open and all school-- maybe even down to high schools, different stuff. There is no profit to be made in this. It is simply a procedure of a test that they say any major lab could process within a couple hours.
You spit in a cup. They can test it in an hour or two. Everybody has all the material, the solutions. And I'm not going to make a fool out of myself describing whatever this process is.
I talked to Robby Sikka over the weekend, extremely confident. Boom, scalable-- you could be doing it next week. It costs $4 a test, $5 a test. We're not sure, but not a lot.
So if you are a football team, you can test every single day. You could test twice a day if you want. And with 90% efficiency, you're not going to have those false negatives, like that screwed up Matthew Stafford for four days while you waited. You test 90% three times in a row, you're well over 99% sure.
Cheap, bang-- when someone's sick, you can pull them out. He thinks there'll be no outbreaks on a team if you're already employing all the other standards, which they are, which is small groups, cleaning locker rooms, limiting 15-minute periods of time, all those things. He thinks it's a game changer. It will allow the teams to know who's healthy every single day.
It will control any outbreak. It should significantly help with the season, potentially. He doesn't want to get into predicting that. But he says in a large group, hypothetically, or in general, I guess he was speaking, this is how-- this thing would work. Massive deal for society and a massive deal for football. To me, it almost guarantees the NFL is going to play.