OSU Says 14 Players Tested Positive for COVID, But Only One Active Case

Oklahoma State announced Monday that it has tested 110 football players for COVID-19 and administered multiple tests per athlete, with only 14 positive results to date.

Of the 14 positives, only one student-athlete is still classified as an “active” case, and that player remains in quarantine, per OSU spokesman Kevin Klintworth. It’s unclear which players tested positive and which player remains quarantined, and the names have not been released.

Update: @OSUAthletics has tested 110 football players (multiple tests per athletes) with 14 positives. Only one student-athlete remains as an active case and is in quarantine. #OkState

— Kevin Klintworth (@KKlintworth) June 29, 2020

Only a select few OSU football players have chosen to identify themselves as positive publicly. The highest-profile player to date is Amen Ogbongbemiga, who announced earlier this month that he tested positive following a weekend trip to Tulsa to attend a Black Lives Matter protest.

Fourteen is a pretty manageable number considering the cases other programs across the country are seeing. Clemson announced Friday it, too, has 14 football players who have tested positive, but its 14 positive results are in addition to 23 players who tested positive the week prior. (Math tells me that’s 37 — nearly triple OSU’s tally.) LSU has also experienced a pretty widespread outbreak, though its official numbers are unknown.

The 2020 season may be a war of attrition (if it even happens). It’s possible teams may lose entire position groups in a given week as outbreaks occur throughout the fall, and it doesn’t seem implausible that forfeits may be a regular occurrence if outbreaks aren’t totally contained.

If there’s a silver lining in this, it’s that health experts believe that getting the virus now infers some immunity even if only in the short-term, so perhaps those infected now can recover and have immunity this fall or built-up antibodies to better fight it should they contract it a second time.