Top Stories

Weston McKennie tests positive for COVID-19

3 Shares

Weston McKennie will not play a role for Juventus for the near future.

Juventus announced Wednesday that McKennie tested positive for COVID-19, joining teammate Cristiano Ronaldo who tested positive on Tuesday. The Serie A club is currently in voluntary isolation after McKennie and multiple members of the team’s setup tested positive in recent days.

McKennie, 22, is on loan in Turin from Bundesliga side FC Schalke. He has started their two Serie A games this season, going 90 minutes in a victory over Sampdoria and being subbed off after 58 minutes in a draw against AS Roma.

Internationally, McKennie has scored six goals in 19 USMNT appearances, and would likely be included in reported November friendlies against Wales and Australia in England.

Juventus next travels to Crotone on Oct. 17th in Serie A play before facing Ukrainian side Dynamo Kiev in UEFA Champions League action on Oct. 20th.

McKennie will need to quarantine for a minimum of 10 days before he is allowed to play again, meaning the earliest he could return to action for Juventus is an Oct. 25 Serie A match against Hellas Verona.

Comments

    • conservative claptrap. theory seems to be if it doesn’t kill you you’re the chosen people. there are studies about 1918 and now on heart effects, brain issues 5-10 years from now. whether people get myocarditis from mild cases.
      whether surviving 1918 or covid now results in an increase in parkinson’s or the like years from now.

      Reply
      • Me and my family had it without knowledge having it, my fat 75 year old father lives with me and had zero symptoms and negative so far. I live in Florida.
        I worry more poor diet and lack exercise.

      • and my thing is there is the “pro sports” approach which obsesses on whether you are testing positive — for worst case reasons, money reasons, trying to keep the league going — and there is NCAA’s approach in most sports and some football conferences where they acknowledge that there may be lingering health problems of risk to athletes short of being in the ICU with pneumonia. myocarditis being the one i have heard most on. bluntly, i worry a lot of the pro approach is like weed out the sick so the show can go on, as opposed to protect the athletes. someone published an article in JAMA cardiology based on Ohio State athletes where of 26 “positive” athletes — all of whom were deemed “mild” or “asymptomatic” and none of whom went to a hospital — 4 were believed to have myocarditis after being put through a battery of diagnostic tests. it wanders into are some of the telling symptoms things you would see on tests and not from obvious hacking and temps, and should the test alone clear you to play. the basic idea is you have kids who would probably fail their physical because of covid but they never thought they were that sick.

    • Odds he will die are probably less than 0.1% but the chances that he has some lasting effects is harder to know since there is little reported about the frequency of young people suffering lasting heart, lung or kidney damage. But it happens enough to be a concern.

      Reply
      • the numbers i have seen in journal articles are 3-4 month antibody immunity. this matches the timing on the few people who have been reinfected. your mileage may vary, and if i understood right there is the idea that you may no longer have specific antibodies but may have cells that “remember” the coronavirus. if you want to pout, that would probably also be the length of time a vaccine would work. now, what a vaccine could do is get the infected + vaccinated up to herd immunity levels. but to do that you would have to have something like 75-80% either sick or vaccinated within the same immunity window where basically the virus runs out of places to go. that in epidemiology terms is what herd immunity is, is a combination of reduced susceptibles and the virus running out of uninfected “networks” to find them. but if immunity is short to be effective you have to have everyone done almost the same time otherwise some people are losing immunity by the time the others are getting the vaccine. it will require heavy duty coordination in a country that is so divided and politicized it can’t even get motivated and on one page to adjust its election laws to a pandemic, with months of lead time. or get PPE and such produced in bulk. so i am not confident.

    • Just read an article yesterday that looked at a group of 2,000 survivors. Over 45% had brain fog, many even months later. That included those with mild symptoms. Additionally, people can have long lasting heart and lung damage. Anyone who tells you they know the effects of COVID-19 is lying. Because it is so recent, they are still discovering aspects of it and are unsure of many things. There still is no definitive answer as to whether surviving it give one immunity. And if it does, how long does that last? Plus, it could mutate, throwing all prior information for a loop

      Reply
      • At least one study based on anti-body measurements suggest that having the virus gives one 5 to 7 month immunity. So far, no reputable scientist has said infection gives lifetime immunity, at least in part because the virus has been around for less than a year, so there is not data from anyone infected more than a single year ago, much less a lifetime. The observation that the antibody in an infected person falls over time would suggest, even to a layman that immunity will fade with time.

      • i think there is an innumeracy problem where people don’t seem to get that in a country of 300 million with millions getting sick even low odds add up to hundreds of thousands dead. 1 in 300 would be a million people. each individual might feel comfortable and think it will be someone in a retirement home. but cumulatively it’s a ton of people. it’s a small city. gone in a year. in terms of what they are risking, i have seen studies in reputable journals trying to sort out whether parkinson’s and like neurological diseases spiked in the years following 1918. i think weston’s odds would be good — young, fit, etc. — but i also think there is only so much we understand about long term impacts. on the virus or from any number of other times you get sick, get put through the ringer, but think you come out fine.

  1. underlining my concern about fall friendlies. even if you work your way around the covid immigration issues, they are spiking and it poses a practical issue. lots of the bubble type ideas involve gathering everyone weeks early then testing and essentially using the 2-week preface as a weed out period. you can’t do that with players released just a few days ahead. you depend on tests and as this and trump and other episodes demonstrate, incubation period is 6-14 days and you can pass this before you know you’re sick. so holding games in anyplace where the virus is prevalent is a risk. or with anyone coming from such a place. anyhow, the deal is if ronaldo is sick today his teammates might be sick two days later.

    Reply
    • To clear up one point you’ve been making. Ronaldo was in Portugal for over a week before he tested positive and hadn’t been in the same country as McKinnie for over 10 days before Wes tested positive. Ronaldo was being tested everyday while with his NT so it is unlikely he brought it from Juventus or infected any of the current Juve players like Wes. Even the likelihood that Wes and Christiano caught it from the same person at Juve is low. Maybe I misunderstood what you were trying to say.

      Reply
      • “incubation period.” QED. this is not flu where you could be sick the next day, or ebola where you can be sick 2 days after infection. this has a 6-14 day incubation. you interact with someone and 1-2 weeks later turn up positive and sick. meanwhile you circulate and spread as well. this is the whole reason that quarantines for this thing are set at 2 weeks after you met someone sick. you have to implicitly work backwards. same fallacy trump has where he pretends he got sick yesterday. no, you would probably have been walking around at least a week. it is the reason why test-focused regimes don’t address the problem, is it’s a lagging indicator. someone could be infected yesterday, test negative for several days, interact with the team, week or two from now is when you start testing positive and feeling bad (if that happens). it’s why IMO by the time anyone on a team is sick there’s a risk they all are.

      • “Juventus had been in isolation following positive tests for two staff members, but Ronaldo and six other players were allowed to leave and join their national teams.” For starters they shouldn’t have been out of quarantine during the incubation period, you’re asking for this. But this also underlines how you could interact on day x and test negative, be released for duty accordingly, and then x+6 or x+14 you get sick and test positive. The NT would say, “but we tested and he was negative.” But the reason a lot of these bubble concepts involve a few weeks in the target city before games — it is de facto quarantine to ensure that any lagging sick folks manifest themselves after incubation. Ronaldo underlines how in the faster international windows you can release someone as well and they test sick the next week — and they could have it from club ball, and might still test negative when they arrive at camp. And they aren’t going to do the month long windows you would need to quarantine properly for going back and forth.

      • to me the “fix” for this where you get qualifying done is a truncated bubble tournament at a single site with a quarantine period before matches are played. like what they do at U23 or U20. otherwise i am not sure you get reliable qualifying (or even a friendly schedule) until there is a vaccine. i mean, what MLS is that bubble tournament and then as i understand it they fly in then right back out the same night.

      • The likelihood that Ronaldo was infected enough to be contagious to Wes but not enough to test positive for 10 days is pretty though. Ronaldo put his Portuguese team at risk leaving for Portugal early not his Juve teammates. Two Portuguese players tested positive last week that’s the likely infection point for Christiano. Doesn’t really matter where either got it, they both have it and hopefully don’t develop any of the lasting effects. That thing about 1918 Flu survivors and Parkinson’s is interesting I’ll have to read more about it.

Leave a Comment