The parents of Cal quarterback Chase Garbers said their son is cleared to play and they expect every starter who tested positive for COVID-19 to be available next Saturday when the Bears visit Stanford for the 124th Big Game.
Grant and Angelique Garbers were part of a well-attended Zoom meeting for the parents of Cal players on Thursday night. Coach Justin Wilcox and medical representatives from Cal took questions and informed them the total number of positive cases in the program had reached 47 but had not climbed further since mid-week.
“Forty-seven, that’s a lot,” Grant Garbers said on Saturday morning.
Among those, 31 experienced some COVID-19 symptoms, according to Garbers’ parents.
“That was kind of surprising,” he added. “The reality is a lot of guys tested positive. How severe the symptoms are, they didn’t elaborate on.”
Cal played a week ago at Arizona without 24 players who had tested positive and faced 10 days of isolation. The number of positives within the program — also including coaches and staff — grew to 44 early this week. That included a significant number of positives among one position group, forcing Cal and USC to reschedule this weekend’s game to Saturday, Dec. 4.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, the associate chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine, had been critical this week of the Berkeley Public Health Department’s mass testing on the team after one positive case emerged nearly two weeks ago.
Because the program is reportedly 99 percent vaccinated, widespread testing is not necessary unless symptoms emerge, Gandhi told The Mercury News on Saturday.
“If there are 31 players who are symptomatic, of course they cannot play and they need to be away from others,” Dr. Gandhi said.
The CDC requires 10 days of isolation in those cases, and Grant Garbers said Cal officials told them there were no new positive results from the second batch of testing this week, which he said was either Wednesday or Thursday.
As a result, Cal is expecting all of those who tested positive to have completed their 10 days of isolation before next Saturday.
“All of them should be cleared for Stanford,” said Grant Garbers, adding that his son is “pretty asymptomatic” and was cleared late this week.
“Chase is doing great,” Angelique Garbers said.
How this happened remains a mystery to most.
“Statistically, it seems like an anomaly that so many vaccinated (people) contracted the virus,” Grant Garbers said.
Dr. Gandhi said the chance of a vaccinated person spreading the virus is greatly reduced.
“What the CDC really showed us the last three months is vaccines definitely reduced transmission,” she said. “It’s not impossible to transmit, but less likely.
“Where you’re most likely to transmit it when you have a symptomatic breakthrough.”
Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a colleague of Gandhi’s at UCSF, said that a PCR test could detect inactive virus — and that’s more likely in young, vaccinated people — but that public health officials are making decisions based on protecting those who are at greater risk than the football team.
“Berkeley football players live in a community and the public health department is probably just going by their guidelines,” he said. “And because it’s a community, it has big repercussions.”
Chin-Hong added that the close contact of a football environment is quite different from normal life and while the numbers in the outbreak are alarming, vaccinated people outside the program don’t need to change their behavior.
“What we’re talking about here is not the failure of the vaccine. It’s just the fact that when you talk about a football team, an infection means something different than someone on the street,” Chin-Hong said.
Garbers’ parents said the Thursday night meeting was calm and informative.
“I think the players’ frustration has been more about a lack of communication and clarity,” Grant Garbers said. “You could sense some frustration with Justin and justifiably so, particularly when Berkeley kind of called out the athletic program.”
Berkeley Public Health early last week released a statement saying the outbreak on the team was due to an “ongoing failure to abide by public health measures.”
“I thought that was inappropriate and wrong,” Grant Garbers said.
Grant Garbers plans to attend the Big Game while Angelique will be at the UCLA-USC game to cheer on their younger son, Ethan, a quarterback with the Bruins.
Chase Garbers scored the game-winning touchdown at Stanford two years ago as Cal snapped a nine-year losing streak in the Big Game.
“They all want to get out there,” Grant Garbers said of the Cal players. “All those guys who are seniors, they’ve been frustrated with this year. Not just the COVID, but getting off to a tough (1-5) start.
“They were getting some momentum (with two straight wins), then Arizona . . . a game going in if they had a full team would have been a third win in a row. That was hard.”
Michael Nowels contributed to this story.
