Coronavirus: Athletes' Health Update

In mid-August, I wrote a blog post about COVID-19's impact on athletes' health. I looked into the impact on the lungs and heart. 

USA Today (Sep 3) has an article about the impact of the virus on Big Ten athletes, which provides an explanation for why the Big Ten and Pac-12 decided to put sports on hiatus:

Cases of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, appear to be prevalent among Big Ten athletes, said Penn State's director of athletic medicine, impacting roughly one-third of all athletes who have tested positive for the coronavirus. 

. . . Many cardiologists, "some high-level," [Wayne Sebastianelli, who is also the team doctor for Penn State football] said, would come to the conclusion that the high percentage of myocarditis cases are incidental and “may not warrant any further investigation or any further sort of concern.”

. . . According to the Mayo Clinic, "In many cases, myocarditis improves on its own or with treatment, leading to a complete recovery."

Even in mild cases, however, the clinic suggests that "persons should avoid competitive sports for at least three to six months." 

Omaha (Sep 3) added this quote from the doctor:

“There have been multiple athletes with elevated troponin levels,” Sebastianelli said. “Which would indicate their heart was really significantly and critically inflamed. You don’t make that up. That’s not something you can make up. Most of the time that troponin level has normalized very quickly, within a week or two. And in some instances it’s remained elevated for a longer period of time.”

Central Daily (Sep 3) adds another quote from the doctor:

“You could have a very high-level athlete who’s got a very superior VO2 max and cardiac output who gets infected with COVID and can drop his or her VO2 max and cardiac output just by 10 percent, and that could make them go from elite status to average status,” Sebastianelli said. “We don’t know that. We don’t know how long that’s going to last. What we have seen when people have been studied with cardiac MRI scans — symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID infections — is a level of inflammation in cardiac muscle that just is alarming.”

Reading the quotes that were selected by Omaha and Central Daily, it appears that Omaha is trying to put a positive spin on the impact of myocarditis while Central Daily is taking a more negative approach. 

From my readings of the articles, at best, this is an issue that puts someone out of competition for 6 months. Who knows if there might be worse outcome, but that outcome might be the end of a person's athletic career and perhaps a shortened life span. I like the approach the Big Ten and Pac-12 are taking. It is better to be safe and allow more research to come out than to purposely put their students at harm. Sure, a lot of them might eventually contract COVID-19 anyways, but at least the universities aren't increasing the probability of catching the virus. (One could argue that by just having in person classes is putting the whole student body at risk, but to me getting an education is far more important than playing sports. Yes, universities should probably re-think in-person classes, but not having close contact sports seems like something a university should do to minimize the spread of the virus.)

One has to wonder if this myocarditis is a reason why there were so many videos of people in China collapsing. Always possible those videos were fakes as I haven't seen any similar videos coming out of the United States. I have seen similar videos coming out of Iran via a Twitter account that I follow. Maybe the United States is taking better care of those infected with COVID-19, knowing that there could be impacts to the heart and that's why we don't see similar videos out of the US? But if these videos are true, a worse case scenario for athletes could be there.