Jets set to face Cardinals as scheduled after additional COVID-19 testing comes back negative
A presumptive positive test sent the Jets' facility into a scare Friday, but a full round of retesting cleared the Week 5 matchup to proceed on time.
The New York Jets sent all players, coaches and personnel home from their New Jersey facility Friday after a player registered a presumptive positive COVID-19 test, according to CBS Sports. Additional testing that evening came back negative for the full team, and the club announced its Week 5 game against the Arizona Cardinals would proceed as scheduled.
"This evening, we received negative PCR COVID-19 test results for all players, coaches and personnel," the Jets said in a statement, per CBS Sports' reporting. The presumptive positive was treated as a false positive once the follow-up results came in.
Cardinals general manager Steve Keim said his team would "prepare as normal" and was "all for playing the game on time, as long as it follows league protocols," according to CBS Sports. Arizona's flight to New York departed on schedule.
The context: a league already dealing with outbreaks
The scare came amid a stretch of the 2020 season in which COVID-19 outbreaks on the Tennessee Titans and New England Patriots had already forced the NFL to reschedule multiple games, per CBS Sports' reporting. That backdrop is why a single presumptive positive was enough to trigger the Jets sending their entire facility home rather than waiting on results.
What isn't confirmed
The retrieved reporting does not name the player whose initial test triggered the shutdown, nor does it detail what specifically caused the presumptive positive to be a false reading. It also does not specify whether the NFL required any modified protocols for the Jets specifically heading into Sunday's game.
The game itself
The Week 5 matchup went ahead as cleared, and the Cardinals beat the Jets 30-10 on October 11, 2020, at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, according to game results compiled by ESPN and Pro Football Reference. The lopsided final score extended a rough start to the season for New York, which entered that Sunday still searching for its first win.
A season already disrupted by outbreaks
The Jets' scare was one of several COVID-19 disruptions across the league that October. The Tennessee Titans' outbreak had already forced the NFL to push their scheduled game against the Pittsburgh Steelers back multiple times, and the New England Patriots dealt with their own positive tests around the same stretch, including quarterback Cam Newton, contemporaneous reporting on the 2020 season's disruptions showed. Those precedents were the backdrop the Jets and Cardinals were operating against when the Friday presumptive positive test briefly put the Week 5 matchup in doubt, according to Revenge of the Birds' contemporaneous coverage of the scare from the Cardinals' side.
NFL.com's own contemporaneous report on the cleared test results echoed the league's public messaging at the time, confirming that all Jets players and personnel had returned negative results and that the game would proceed as scheduled — reporting that mirrored CBS Sports' account and underscored how closely outlets were tracking every team's testing status that October as the league tried to avoid further postponements.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by CBS Sports, with additional detail on the game's final result and the season's wider COVID-19 disruptions drawn from ESPN, Pro Football Reference and Revenge of the Birds' contemporaneous reporting. It restores a story originally published on this site in October 2020; figures are as reported at the time.