Update 7:20 p.m. ET: As it turns out, the information given by Sebastianelli was hearsay that didn't turn out to be true:
Original Article
The Big Ten may be contemplating a reversal on its decision to postpone the 2020 football season, but new data illustrates the depth of the impact COVID-19 may have on players who test positive.
According to Wayne Sebastianelli, Penn State’s director of athletic medicine, cardiac MRI scans revealed that approximately one-third of Big Ten athletes who tested positive for COVID-19 appeared to have myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle that can sometimes be fatal if untreated.
Sebastianelli revealed this data during a State College Area school board of directors meeting on Monday, according to the Centre Daily Times.
“When we looked at our COVID-positive athletes, whether they were symptomatic or not, 30 to roughly 35 percent of their heart muscles (are) inflamed,” he said. “And we really just don’t know what to do with it right now. It’s still very early in the infection. Some of that has led to the Pac-12 and the Big Ten’s decision to sort of put a hiatus on what’s happening.”
An ESPN report in August detailed that the link between coronavirus and myocarditis factored into the Big Ten’s decision to suspend the season as some student-athletes were discovered to have developed the complication after testing positive.
Myocarditis was also found in Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez after testing positive for coronavirus and resulted in him missing the 2020 season.
Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren, who cited “too much medial uncertainty and too many unknown health risks” for his reason in postponing, recently had a conference call with President Donald Trump about the possibility of salvaging of salvaging the season.
Quick and efficient testing appeared to be one of the major hurdles, but Sebastianelli continued to caution the unknown factor.
“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 is 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.”
Penn State was among the schools which voted in favor of postponing the football season, but Sebastianelli told the Centre Daily Times in an email he has not had a direct conversation with university president Eric Barron about the most recent data.
“We all have concerns for the healthy and safety of every PSU student-athlete, as well as those at every level of competition,” he said. “This is a public health issue.”
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