Bears breathe sigh of relief after Sunday scare

[Staley Da Bear]

The Bears then had all nine individuals who had tested positive come to Halas Hall for follow-up tests. All nine tested negative, and it soon became known that Saturday's testing had returned several positive tests across the NFL from teams serviced by the same laboratory in New Jersey.


At that point, the Bears rescheduled Sunday's practice for 1:30 p.m.


"I gave about a 15-minute warning and we had 140 people on a Zoom call this morning at 9 o'clock," Nagy said. "We were able to talk through what our timeline's going to be today. They adjusted on the run. I've been having 1-on-1 conversations with players on the team that have any questions or concerns. All completely open. All completely honest. We're in this thing together. We're a family. Everybody wants to know where things are at. That's all we can do is give them what we know."


To that end, holding the Zoom call was in keeping with the organization's philosophy to be transparent and honest.


"Ryan and I felt like it was very important to make sure that our players and their families and our coaches and support staff and their families knew what was going on and heard it from us," Nagy said. "They understood, they asked some questions. Inevitably, when something like this goes down, you're going to ask questions. That's human nature. They want to know the 'why' part. And so, it's easy for us to be able to tell them, 'Hey, this is what we know. We've never been through this before, but I promise you this, you will get every bit of honesty and care as to how we tackle this thing, and if you trust us and you realize that we will never put you or your family in harm's way, then let's go practice. Let's go do our deal,' and that's what they did. That's a credit to them. They didn't flinch."


Preparing for a multitude of scenarios involving COVID-19 helped the Bears weather Sunday's storm.


"If you go into the season as a leader or really anybody in this building and you kind of prep for this stuff, then it doesn't catch you off guard," Nagy said. "This is definitely the year of the contingency plan. You have to have 'what ifs' and backups really in everything you do.


"Everybody understands right now in our building, we keep saying 'expect the unexpected' and we talk about adaptation and being able to adjust on the run. And that's kind of what happened here in the last 12 hours."