Mikaela Mayer said Thursday that a doctor who reviewed the positive coronavirus test that eliminated her from Tuesday night’s Top Rank card in Las Vegas said he would have allowed her to fight.
Mayer tested positive for coronavirus on Saturday upon arriving in Las Vegas and was pulled from the card immediately without a retest. Since the rest of her team tested negative, Mayer says she believes she should have been retested for a potential false positive, especially since she tested positive for the antibodies in Houston the week before her fight.
The 29-year-old took another coronavirus test in Denver on Tuesday in hopes of showing the Vegas test was a false positive — and those results are pending as of Thursday afternoon. If Mayer tests negative, she said she wants to get back to training as soon as possible to hopefully fight later this summer.
Mayer said the doctor told her she should still be allowed to fight because she wasn’t actively sick and a positive test can still occur even if your body is shedding remnants of the virus. When contacted, Mayer’s manager, George Ruiz, would not reveal the name of the doctor.
“You are not sick and not infectious and your blood tests confirmed this,” the doctor’s letter to Mayer said. “The problem is getting non-physicians to understand the dynamics and manage the panic. This case is a perfect example of why athletic commissions throughout the world need to change their process in the near future.”
The physician also told Mayer he would continue to push the Nevada State Athletic Commission for alternative options to the current protocol.
This is similar to what Mayer and Ruiz have been pushing for since the positive test sidelined Mayer.
“What we’re hoping is that we refine the protocols so that somebody that may have been exposed to COVID-19 but is no longer a threat to anyone else because they are no longer infectious be allowed to fight,” Ruiz said. “Otherwise what you’ll do is you’ll eliminate every single fighter who has ever been exposed to COVID-19 and that’s going to be a growing group of people.”
This week, both Ruiz and Mayer said multiple times they aren’t blaming anyone, since Top Rank, the Nevada State Athletic Commission and all parties involved in putting together the fights are still figuring out best practices. They say they believe safety should come first.
But Ruiz also said there should be more to the process.
“Accuracy and science matter and those should be incorporated into the existing protocols,” Ruiz said. “I think a retest or a secondary test, a follow-up, and certainly a determination of whether somebody is potentially infectious should be part of the protocols.”