NBA Announces 16 Of 302 Players Test Positive For COVID-19

Of the 302 NBA players tested for the coronavirus on June 23, a total of 16 have come back positive, the NBA and NBPA announced today. That’s a positive test rate of 5.3%.

While those players likely won’t all be publicly identified, we know a few of them already. Malcolm Brogdon, Jabari Parker, Buddy Hield, Alex Len, and Derrick Jones are among the players whose positive tests were reported earlier this week.

Any player diagnosed with the coronavirus will be self-quarantined until he “satisfies public health protocols” for discontinuing isolation and has been cleared by a doctor, the league said in today’s announcement. The expectation is that once a player is fully cleared and has tested negative for the virus twice, at least 24 apart, he’ll still be able to travel to Orlando next month to participate in the NBA’s restart.

The 22 teams set to play at the Disney campus are carrying more than 302 players in total, so not every single player on those rosters was checked for COVID-19 on Tuesday, when testing began. The reasons for that discrepancy are unclear, but I’d expect the remaining players to began undergoing testing shortly, if they haven’t already.

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