8 Penn State student-athletes test positive for COVID-19, athletic department reports
Penn State Athletics announced its third round of COVID-19 testing results Wednesday afternoon, reporting eight positive cases among student-athletes.
There were zero positives after the first and second rounds of testing, and the Nittany Lions announced their first positive result among student-athletes July 23.
The eight positives are out of 288 new tests as of July 24, with 66 tests still pending. The athletic department has conducted 466 tests thus far.
Neither the sports nor the identities of the individuals to test positive were announced.
The previous results came after 178 tests of student-athletes. The new results fall in line with a schedule Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour announced on a July 1 conference call.
“We have been testing our student-athletes and staff upon their return,” Barbour told reporters. “As a university and an athletic department, we’ve decided that we’ll report those results every two weeks.”
The next testing update is set for Aug. 12, based on their plan of releasing results every two weeks.
The Nittany Lions’ results come after several universities have announced much higher positive test totals in recent weeks, including Clemson — which has 53 positives as of July 10 — and North Carolina — which had 37 announced positives as of July 8. Ohio State restarted its offseason workout program two weeks ago after it shut it down the week prior based on positive tests.
Michigan State and Rutgers have both quarantined their entire football teams their latest rounds of COVID-19 testing.
Centre County reported five new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, according to the state Department of Health, which brings the county’s total to 370 since the first case was reported on March 20.
Penn State’s football program is in the third phase of its offseason workout program, and the team is allowed to use a football in practice.
While programs are returning to campus and some are in the midst of workouts, the status of the fall sports season is still in doubt. The Big Ten announced a conference-only schedule for all fall sports earlier this month. The conference has yet to lay out a definite schedule for any sport.
If the schedule remains the same, the Nittany Lion football will start its season against Northwestern on Sept. 26 in Beaver Stadium.
This story was originally published July 29, 2020 at 1:20 PM.
