Penn State suspends team activities indefinitely after coronavirus outbreak

A new coronavirus outbreak on campus has caused Penn State to suspend all team activities for the foreseeable future.

The coronavirus pandemic is still ravaging North America, putting sports in jeopardy. Unlike professional sports, collegiate athletics don’t have the luxury of creating bubbled environments to prevent a spread. The latest school to discover that hard truth is Penn State.

On Wednesday, the school announced that all team activities are suspended indefinitely after 48 student-athletes tested positive for COVID-19. The new number of positive cases stems from testing 920 students from Aug. 31-Sept. 4. Penn State has not disclosed the exact number of new positive tests across all teams. Student-athletes and members of the coaching staff have been receiving at least one COVID-19 test per week.

Penn State did not specify which sports were affected by positive cases to protect the privacy of the students.

“Based on these results and out of an abundance of caution, Penn State Athletics has paused team activities for several programs and initiated standard isolation and precautionary quarantine,” Penn State said in a statement, via ESPN. “Contact tracing is being performed and there is no evidence to suggest COVID-19 was transmitted during practice or training activities.”

Penn State joins Maryland and Iowa as fellow Big Ten schools who have paused organized team activities due to positive cases among athletes on campus.

All 48 student-athletes who tested positive are required to enter self-quarantine for 14 days, where they will be retested after that span. Additionally, the university has put in place a contact tracing protocol, which would have students who come into close-contact with positive or asymptomatic individuals to undergo testing and enter quarantine.

Unfortunately, Penn State isn’t the only school in the Big Ten conference to suspend team activities. On Aug. 31, Iowa paused all team workouts until Labor Day after the school had 93 positive COVID-19 cases during their testing period from Aug. 24-29. Maryland placed team activities on Sept. 3 after 46 student-athletes received positive tests, spanning across 10 teams.

Having hundreds of students from across the nation flock to a university campus was always going to prevent colleges from having normal academic years, especially since we’re still navigating through a global pandemic. Penn State’s five-percent positivity rate is proof of that.

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