re: Alabama Board Coronavirus Thread

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Alabama football coach Nick Saban discussed his staff and players' handling of the pandemic during a Zoom press conference with the media on Tuesday evening.

“We have a process that we use around here," Saban said. "We test everybody three times a week. We’ve had a minimal amount of players that tested positive, but we have had some. I think we were less than one percent from the Fourth of July to when school started. That number probably went up a little bit when school started but not really significantly. And I think it’s very important to understand that we started this whole thing in terms of we need to have tests and we need to social distance and we need to do all this stuff because we were very concerned about overloading the healthcare system because of how contagious this is."

Earlier in the summer when players returned to campus, rumors began to circulate that some players had come back and had tested positive. Those rumors were later confirmed to be true, although no official number of players that tested positive or who the infected players were was never released by Alabama athletics.

Fortunately, according to Saban, the majority of the players that have tested positive since July have not fallen terribly ill with the virus.

"We haven’t had any players that are really bad sick from this," Saban said. "A lot of guys that test positive are even asymptomatic. I actually think, even though we focus on the number of students that have tested positive, the hospitalizations have gone down in Tuscaloosa since school started, and I think that’s the thing that we need to be most concerned about and we’re most concerned that our players — how are they impacted by this?"

Saban then added that he and his staff are doing everything possible to ensure their players' safety.

"They have to be out and we take good care of them and we’re doing everything that we can," Saban said. "We even had the Surgeon General Zoom with them a few weeks ago about their personal bubble, things that they can do to make sure they stay safe, understand the risks of this to certain population groups that have pre-existing conditions and are older and not spreading that to anybody else, as well as you doing the best you can not to put yourself in a situation where you may get it. And I think our players have done a pretty good job of that.

"We wear masks in meetings, we spread out in meetings. It’s been some changes for us but nothing that really has affected how functional we can actually be.”

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