It remains possible that Conor McKenna never had COVID-19 to begin with.
After returning an irregular sample on Friday and testing positive on Saturday, McKenna then returned a negative on Monday to the bewilderment of the football community.
Infectious disease expert at the Australian National University, Sanjaya Senanayake, believes it’s possible the Essendon defender simply never had the virus at all.
“Look, it’s possible (he never had it) and as I was just saying it’s nice to have a good curve and you want it to happen quite quickly within a cycle,” he told SEN Breakfast.
“It’s possible that this was a very dodgy looking curve that occurred quickly or it was a strong looking curve, but maybe it took 37 cycles instead of under 35 cycles to occur and in the lab they’ll go ‘that’s not quite negative, it’s not quite positive, what do we do from here?’
“Then they’ll go and check out how likely is it that this person has got it and test it again using the same test kit, let’s get our other coronavirus test kits and test it again, let’s get another sample, because they want to get it right.”
Senanayake added that the COVID-19 tests used in Australia aren’t 100 per cent accurate.
"With a test - there is a gold standard we like to compare it to. With COVID-19 we don’t have a gold standard - we aren’t 100% sure how brilliant it (the test) is,” Senanayake said.
Listen to the full interview below