The Scottish Premiership season should still kick off on August 1 despite seven St Mirren coaching staff testing positive for coronavirus, according to Scotland's national clinical director.
Professor Jason Leitch admitted the batch of positive tests - which were reduced to one after a duplicate examination - was "a little bit of a hiccup" but expected the campaign to restart as planned next weekend.
Top flight clubs have returned to testing players and staff for COVID-19 twice a week after a slew of issues around the protocols.
Hibernian were forced to cancel a bounce game against Ross County at their East Mains training centre after delays returning the Easter Road side's test results last weekend.
Rangers and Motherwell similarly had to push back the kick off of their runout at Ibrox following issues with obtaining medical paperwork.
However, Prof Leitch said moves are now being made to better integrate private testing used by football clubs with the NHS's Test and Protect system.
But he added that this should not impede the season starting next weekend, telling the BBC's Off the Ball : "A couple of friendly games had to be called off, but hopefully, all being well, the league can start on 1 August.
"Just now, that testing is not as reliable as our NHS testing, so we then retest them and put them in the 'Test and Protect' system.
"It may be that if we can get those labs examined and accredited, we can put all of that into one big bundle, but that is going to take a wee while because there's quite a lot of private laboratories offering Covid testing."
Six of the positive tests recorded by St Mirren were later confirmed to be 'false positives' while one other was proven to be accurate.
Prof Leitch stressed that 'footballers and football clubs are not exempt from 'Test and Protect,'' though admitted he rated the current testing system as 'eight out of ten'.
"There is clearly some work to do behind the scenes, but, in the main, the system has worked pretty well and they have gone back to testing twice a week to try to keep these bubbles secure."
