Williams, Martin Placed on COVID-19 List But Packers’ Game at 49ers Remains a Go

GREEN BAY, Wis. – The Green Bay Packers placed running back Jamaal Williams and linebacker Kamal Martin on the COVID-19 reserve list on Tuesday after the NFL deemed them of being “high-risk close contacts” with running back AJ Dillon.

That means Williams and Martin, who both started the Sunday loss to Minnesota, are out for Thursday night’s game against the San Francisco. With Dillon being the only positive test, the game remains scheduled to be played.

“We’ve been in that scenario many, many, many times over the 13 weeks that we’ve been doing this,” NFL chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills said during a conference call on Tuesday. “We want to be as safe as possible. That’s why we go through the detailed exercise of contact tracing. That’s why we go through the detailed exercise of identifying high-risk contacts. We continue to consider that every one of our 32 clubs are vulnerable to infection every single day that we’re in business, just like all of us are around the country right now, and we have to all just continue to be extremely vigilant about the measures that we know that mitigate risk.”

The loss of Williams could be a major blow. Starting running back Aaron Jones has missed the last two games with a calf strain and might not be ready to face the 49ers. If Jones, Williams and Dillon are sidelined, the Packers will be left with only Tyler Ervin and Dexter Williams in the backfield. Ervin has been more receiver than running back this season. As a rookie, Dexter Williams played in only four games with 10 snaps on offense and 38 on special teams. He carried five times for 11 yards as a rookie and failed to make the roster coming out of training camp this summer.

Dillon tested positive during Sunday’s pregame wave of testing, with coach Matt LaFleur learning of the result of Monday morning.

The NFL dinged Jamaal Williams and Martin as high-risk close contacts. That means, even if they test negative for COVID-19, they are isolated from team activities for five days just to ensure they don’t develop symptoms after the fact due to the virus’ slow incubation period. Because of the short turnaround for Thursday’s game at San Francisco, that automatically made them ineligible.

Contact tracing helps the league separate high-risk contacts with general contacts. The proximity-tracking devices worn by players, coaches and staff are part of the puzzle, as are interviews with affected players and footage from the game.

“We’re really looking at four different parts of a matrix,” Sills said. “We’re looking at cumulative time, distance, whether or not a mask was present and how much ventilation might have been present. Those are the four factors that scientists and medical authorities feel like are most related to transmission. We take that information and construct a list of high-risk contacts.”

So long as no other members of the team test positive, the game against the 49ers will proceed as scheduled. However, due to the virus’ incubation period, it remains a potentially fluid situation.

“I would say in those instances where we’ve postponed games, it’s been a situation where we have a number of cases and we can’t find a common thread, we can’t find a linkage and we’re having difficulty or have an unusually high number of high risk contacts, then those are situations where we’ve considered postponement,” Sills said. “But I would just say we’ve had a large number of situations where we’ve had one positive test, a small number of high-risk contacts and clubs have been able to safely continue operations through that time. It’s something that we continue to monitor on a day-by-day basis based on the test results but that’s where we are as of today.”