Sunday May 30th 2021
13 percent of players infected
Sports medicine: high corona numbers in the Bundesliga
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In the past season, 69 players in the first Bundesliga were infected with the corona virus. That is a high percentage, says sports medicine specialist Bloch. A bubble in which the football professionals would have been shielded from the outside world simply would not have existed.
Sports medicine specialist Wilhelm Bloch was amazed at the number of new corona infections in the past season of the Bundesliga. “Compared with the number of footballers we have in the first Bundesliga, that’s a relatively high percentage of players who have become infected. You just have to say that,” said the professor at the German Sports University on Deutschlandfunk.
According to the broadcaster, the 18 first division clubs made the infections of 69 professionals public in the past season. That would be around 13 percent of all Bundesliga players and a slightly higher average than in the comparable group of the general population. Sports medicine specialist Bloch pointed out, however, that a bubble in which the football professionals had no contact with the outside world could not be implemented over a season.
According to the German Football League, there were 217 corona infections among players, coaches and supervisors of the first and second division teams in the past season. “In two cases, players had to be hospitalized, but fortunately each was discharged after a few days,” said national team doctor Tim Meyer, who also heads the “Sports Medicine / Special Game Operations” task force for professional football.
Due to the high number and time density of the tests, there was hardly an unreported number of infections in professional football, emphasized the DFB doctor. “If we put the 217 positive cases in relation to around 1700 regularly tested people, the incidence is in the order of magnitude of the general population, if one takes into account the number of unreported cases found in studies.”
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