(Reuters) – The PGA Tour will roll out three mobile laboratories that will conduct on site testing at all tournaments as the sport returns from a nearly three-month coronavirus hiatus next week with the Charles Schwab Challenge in Texas.
The mobile testing units, each manned by a driver and three technicians, will arrive the Saturday before the tournament and test all players, caddies and essential personnel.
Each swab collection will take less than five minutes and test results returned in between two and four hours.
The PGA Tour said that approximately 400 individuals will be tested on-site each week.
“Not only will Sanford Health’s mobile laboratories enable us to deliver test results in a matter of hours so that our athletes can properly prepare for competition, but they will also allow us to implement our testing program without utilizing critical resources from the communities in which we play,” Andy Levinson, PGA Tour Senior Vice President Tournament Administration, said in a statement on Wednesday.
The PGA Tour, forced into a COVID-19 hiatus mid-March, released a revised schedule in April with the first four events to be played without spectators, starting with the June 11-14 Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth, Texas.
The other tournaments slated to be held without fans are the RBC Heritage (June 18-21) in Hilton Head, S.C., the Travelers Championship (June 25-28) in Cromwell, Conn., and the Rocket Mortgage Classic (July 2-5) in Detroit.
(Reporting by Steve Keating in Toronto, editing by Ed Osmond)
