“The goal is not to test as much as possible, said Dr. Christina Mack, vice president of epidemiology and clinical evidence at the healthcare data science company. IQVIA A joint advisor to the Association and the Syndicate. “The goal is to set up a comprehensive program to keep people safe and to strategically detect infections when they are present.”

But Mayer, the union’s medical director, disagreed.

“You can’t interfere in the face of what you know about the virus unless you know what the virus is doing,” he said.

Dr. Allen Sales, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said in an interview on November 30 that the rise in cases This season needs to be examined and responded in the context of the current landscape.

The NFL collects real-time data from testing, contact tracing, genetic sequencing, and essentially virus fingerprinting that enables scientists to identify variants and map transport chains. Sales said that genetic sequencing indicates that in the majority of cases, transmission occurred in the outside community, rather than among highly vaccinated team members.

“We don’t think Covid Zero is an achievable goal,” he said, especially with players and their families interacting with the outside world more than they did last season, when stay-at-home orders limited movement. The task now, Sales said, is to avoid outbreaks of serious illness and heart complications.

“I think our story this year has shown that while we still have positive tests, we are not seeing the same disease burden that we saw in 2020,” he said.

NFL testing has shown that vaccinated players who test positive tend to have milder disease and shorter duration — with nearly 20 percent testing for isolation 10 days earlier, the league said. Unvaccinated players must quarantine for at least 10 days if they test positive, while vaccination may return when they submit two negative tests 24 hours apart.