ATLANTA — Georgia State freshman quarterback Mikele Colasurdo is sidelined for the 2020 football season.
He received a positive COVID-19 diagnosis back in July and developed a heart condition a few weeks after. He’s warning other athletes to take this virus seriously, so that the same doesn’t happen to them.
“You’re not immune to this, this could happen to you, too," Colasurdo said. "Me being a 19-year-old athlete and a healthier person, I’m not someone that has had a preexisting condition."
Colasurdo was a state champion at Chapman High School in South Carolina and was looking forward to his new beginning with the Panthers. Even after finally testing negative for the virus, it was the tests administered at Georgia State that alerted doctors something just wasn’t right about his heart.
“That was kind of the whole scary thing. If I was working out at home, I would have never known,” Colasurdo explained.
His doctors have not yet pinpointed exactly what the condition is, but he will have an MRI later this week to further examine the issue.
“We’ve talked about mild carditis, which is inflammation of the inside of the heart. We’ve also talked about pericarditis which is inflammation of the outside of the heart. The tricky thing is we just don’t one hundred percent know what the issue is quite yet," he said.
The doctors have however made a clear connection between his positive COVID-19 diagnosis and this now-existing heart condition.
“I’ve never had any heart issues or anything like that before," Colasurdo said.
When he found out he couldn’t play football this year he said, “Today I watched our team practice and that’s when it hit me. I thought about how much I’m going to miss this whenever games start happening.”
He’s also under strict protocol to completely limit physical activity for now. However, his doctors do have confidence that this won’t turn into a larger issue down the line.
“He explained it to me as a reactionary thing. This happened because I just got sick and can happen with a lot of infections. He thinks this is going to be a relatively short-term issue that should be able to be resolved," Colasurdo said.