COVID-19: 8 Footballers Test Positive In Mexico League

Eight soccer players at Mexico’s Santos Laguna club have tested positive for COVID-19 but none of them are displaying any symptoms, the Mexican governing body, Liga MX, said on Wednesday.

The Mexican league was suspended on March 15 due to the coronavirus outbreak and officials have not indicated when it would restart.

A decision on the possible resumption of the Mexican league, the Liga MX, had been expected by the end of the week, and the tests were carried out with a view to resuming training.

The players at Santos Laguna had all been tested since Monday, the league said. Neither Liga MX nor the club released the names of the footballers who tested positive.

“This particular situation makes resuming the league more complicated,” Santos Laguna’s owner, Alejandro Irarragorri, told TV sports channel TUDN. He also hinted that the situation at Santos Laguna could be even worse, because so far only 22 results have come back out of 48 tests on players and coaches. Liga MX said the players with COVID-19, whose identities have not been revealed, were asymptomatic.

Two other clubs, Guadalajara and Monterrey, are also carrying out screening for the disease. Monterrey said it had not identified any positive cases. With more than 6,000 fatalities, Mexico has the second highest coronavirus death toll in Latin America after Brazil.

Play stopped in the Liga MX in mid-March, and less than a week later the league’s president Enrique Bonilla announced he had caught the disease, without serious symptoms. The president of San Luis, another club in the Mexican league, has also been diagnosed with COVID-19.

Mexico has registered 56,594 coronavirus infections and 6,090 deaths in total. Earlier on Wednesday, health officials reported 424 new fatalities, a record one-day death toll since the start of the pandemic.