India Men's hockey team captain Manpreet Singh and three other players have tested positive for COVID-19 ahead of a national camp in Bengaluru, the Sports Authority of India (SAI) said on Friday. Besides Manpreet, defender Surender Kumar, Jaskaran Singh, and drag-flicker Varun Kumar have also tested positive for the virus. "I am self quarantined on the SAI campus and I am very happy with the way SAI authorities have handled the situation... I am doing fine and hope to recover very soon," Manpreet said in the statement issued by SAI. "I am very happy that they made the testing of athletes mandatory. That proactive step helped in identifying the problem right in time."
The players tested positive after returning to the national hockey camp at the SAI South centre in Bengaluru following a month-long break. They were earlier stranded at the centre for over two months (till June) when a nationwide lockdown was imposed to contain the coronavirus pandemic. The players were in mandatory quarantine before the resumption of training at the centre.
"SAI made it mandatory for all athletes who reported back to the camp to take a rapid COVID-19 test upon arrival," the SAI said in a statement. "Since all the athletes who tested positive had travelled together, there is a high likelihood that they contracted the virus while travelling from their hometowns to Bengaluru."
The SAI further said that all the four players initially tested negative in the rapid test. But when Manpreet and Surender began to display some COVID-19 symptoms, they along with 10 other players, who had travelled together, were made to take the Quantitative RT-PCR test on Thursday.
"...and the four have been found to be COVID positive. Though the test results have still not been handed over to SAI, but the state government has informed the test results to the SAI authorities," the SAI said.
The test results of a few players are still awaited. All athletes including Manpreet who reported to the camp were undergoing a mandatory 14-day quarantine as per the Health Ministry guidelines.
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As a precautionary measure, they were kept in isolation to negate the possibility of transmission of the virus. "The quarantined athletes did not interact with other athletes who were already present at the camp," the SAI said. The Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) of the state government and of SAI were followed strictly across the campus.
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