Packers WR Marquez Valdes-Scantling placed on reserve/Covid-19 list

On Tuesday, the Green Bay Packers announced that Marquez Valdes-Scantling was placed on the reserve/Covid-19 list. As Tom Silverstein of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted on Twitter, Valdes-Scantling has been doing in-person interviews with the media this season, the league’s roundabout way of confirming that a player is vaccinated.

If Valdes-Scantling is vaccinated, like many are presuming, then that means that Valdes-Scantling would only need to pass a single Covid test with a negative result to return to the field for the Cleveland Browns game on Saturday. Due to recent changes in the league’s protocol, players can now essentially take tests up until the day of an event to test into participation. Previously, vaccinated players needed to pass two tests with a negative result at least 24 hours apart, meaning a positive test 24 hours before an event would knock them out of participation. The “test-in” method only applies to vaccinated players, though, as unvaccinated players still are removed from competition for at least a 10-day window.

While the team has not commented on why Valdes-Scantling was tested in the first place, there are basically three ways that a player can trigger a test:

1. Unvaccinated players are still tested daily.
2. Vaccinated players who show symptoms are tested. Previously, vaccinated players were tested whether they showed symptoms or not.
3. Random testing is now a factor as four players per teams are randomly chosen to take a test as part of the league’s “spot testing” protocol.

If Valdes-Scantling is vaccinated, that would mean that he would fall under one of the last two categories, meaning he either showed symptoms or was randomly selected to take a test. Either way, here’s to hoping that Valdes-Scantling makes a healthy recovery from the virus.