Lots of athletes, both professional and college, have tested positive for COVID-19. Have any of them been hospitalized?
I’m basically wondering if being in outstanding physical condition is in any way protective. You often hear about someone dying of COVID who was in good shape, but I’m not sure how accurate those characterizations are. So I figure to look at people who are definitely in really good shape, i.e. athletes. I have yet to hear of any athlete who’s been hospitalized, but it’s quite possible I missed some report.
The hospitals (at least in the U.S.) almost undoubtedly would not be allowed to say so, due to regulations about patient privacy. I suspect that the teams and leagues would also be discouraged from revealing that information.
So, unless an athlete stated publicly, “Yes, I was hospitalized for COVID,” we might never know.
The news media is not bound by any sort of medical privacy laws, so we’d likely hear if any athlete was seriously ill.
Of course being young and healthy is protective. You often hear of people in good shape dying of COVID because it sells clicks and advertisements, not because it’s common. Simply glancing at the demographics of COVID deaths will show that young healthy people are at a vastly decreased risk of serious illness and death compared to older and sicker people. It’s astonishing to me that the media is successfully able to distort this fact by continuously reporting the rare stories of young healthy people getting sick or dying while not mentioning their rarity.
I’m not asking about being young and healthy, I’m asking about being in outstanding physical condition. There’s a difference. A lot of “young and healthy” people are actually in crappy physical condition.
There’s a personal reason for this question. I’m healthy but not young. Let’s say that I’ve been eligible for AARP membership for well over a decade. But I’m in very good physical condition, not quite as good as, say, college athletes, but pretty close. So I’m wondering how protective this will be if I happen to test positive. I’m worried more about damage to my lungs, heart and other critical organs than anything else.
OK, Deeg, thank you. That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for.
Notable cases: Tony Boselli (retired) was hospitalized, Mark Cambell (retired) was hospitalized for 5 days.
I don’t see any current athletes listed as hospitalized at least in that article, but I know there have been a few local high school athletes that have been. I’ve heard at least one other anecdotal story about a 20-something distance runner (so in good shape) that still has pretty severe difficulty breathing months after his initial diagnosis.
If a player (and his or her team) truly wanted to keep a hospitalization quiet, I’m confident that they could.
The hospital and its staff are required to keep such information private, due to HIPAA regulations. And, while (depending on the sport) a team likely needs to file information with the league that a player is unavailable to play, there’s no requirement to give that kind of detail.
A good friend of mine works at one of the major hospitals here in Chicago. He tells me that a number of famous celebrities (Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees, Oscar winners, etc.) have been hospitalized there, and that information never made it out into the public. They enter and leave the hospital bundled up, they are referred to by pseudonyms by hospital staff, etc.
The St. Louis Cardinals haven’t played a game in over a week, due to a total of 16 members of the organization (including both players and staff members) testing positive for coronavirus. Today, the team’s manager, Mike Schildt, said:
It was not clear if he was talking about players going to the ER, or if it was only infected non-player staff members, but in either case, it sounds like no one from the Cardinals has yet actually been admitted to a hospital.