Story By: Juan Mayes, Sub Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Golder’s News And Sport
The first female Mexican athlete to test positive for coronavirus has revealed she coughed blood before being hospitalised for several days in a “serious condition”.
Mexican pentathlon athlete Mariana Arceo, 25, made the comments in an interview with ESPN where she spoke about her “crisis” with the coronavirus, officially named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization.
When speaking about her diagnosis, Arceo said: “The symptoms I had were diarrhoea, strong pain in my bones. Then I had a cough and a sore throat.
“I thought it was from the training but the moment I coughed up blood, I immediately decided to protect myself.
“One of the tests was a pulmonary tomography, they (doctors) realised that I had very advanced pneumonia and decided to immediately hospitalise me.
“The tests of the virus take approximately 12 hours so the next day when I was already hospitalised, they gave me the news that I tested positive.”
She went on to say that “no matter how much you think about it you have no idea of how, where or if you were the only person to get infected.”
Local media report Arceo was in a camp in the Spanish city of Barcelona when she started to present symptoms of the virus making her the first female Mexican athlete to test positive for COVID-19.
She went on to say: “The rest of the team came out negative, I was the only one to be infected and didn’t go outside at any moment except once for hydration.”
Arceo revealed how serious her condition was saying: “My siblings were the first to find out but when I reached the point where they (doctors) wanted to intubate me was when I had to tell my parents I was in hospital” adding that “it was a very difficult crisis.”
Intubate is a procedure where doctors insert a tube into a patient’s body in order to facilitate breathing.
Arceo added: “Most of the cases are reaching young people leaving them in serious conditions so age doesn’t matter, we are all prone to suffer this virus.
“It was a challenge in my life but fortunately I am okay and out of danger”
When speaking about taking up training again for the Tokyo Olympics, which have been postponed to the summer of 2021, she said: “I have to start little by little.
“I can’t start right now because I’m taking strong medication that may affect my heart. I am sure that I will be able to recuperate and all the other athletes are going to arrive in good form to the Olympic games”
The Tokyo Olympics are going to be the 25-year-old’s first Games and she won a gold medal in the 2019 Pan American Games held in the Peruvian capital of Lima.
There have been a reported 730,665 cases of COVID-19 leading to 34,769 deaths around the globe.
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