"Young elite athletes can be badly offended"

The Wall Street Journal has spoken to 17 medical experts and all agree that most elite athletes will certainly not be hit particularly hard by the corona virus because they do not belong to risk groups. But they also agree that a certain proportion of athletes will be seriously ill - and that one does not know what effects this will have on their return to their sport.

- I'm not worried about them getting into a respirator or dying. But I'm worried that they won't be able to get back to the same level they had before - even if they even come back to the sport, epidemiologist Neel Gandhi at Emory University told the magazine.

Swedish sports doctors agree that you have to take a serious look at the corona virus as it sometimes affects young and healthy very hard.

- We have also seen in Sweden that young elite athletes can become quite ill-tempered, says Per "Pliggen" Andersson, who is also a doctor for the skiing team.

One of the athletes is skier Jennie Öberg, who had bilateral pneumonia and needed hospital care. She later quit her career.

Matilda Lundblad, team physician for Allsvenska Elfsborg and damallsvenska Gothenburg, says that you do everything to avoid getting the infection into the law as it can have serious consequences.

- I am clear in the communication with the players, to make them stick to the guidelines, that if you get seriously ill and get pneumonia, it will have the same consequences as in the case of a serious knee injury. Then you will be gone for several months, she says.

What sports doctors consider is most important to keep in mind, if an elite athlete gets a serious infection, is the return to training after the illness.

- We have extra attention on the heart. Then you are wondering if the virus could cause some form of lung function impairment, but it is too early to say, says Andersson.

He also says he is wondering if the corona virus works like other viral diseases, such as glandular fever, which can cause prolonged fatigue afterwards.

- It is probably one such thing that one can probably look for such an infection and it would have major consequences for our elite athletes.

According to the Wall Street Journal, there are examples of young people who have not become seriously ill, but who have suffered from extreme fatigue for months afterwards.

A challenge for the sports doctors is the athletes who get covid-19 without any noticeable symptoms. It is not known if the athletes can get sick in any other way because they continued to train hard when they had the virus in their body.

According to football's guidelines, anyone who has had symptoms of the virus should return to training (ascending) after two days and after one week if he has been bedridden with a fever for one week.