Duke Recruiting: Covid Forces Filipowski Out Of Peach Jam

As we have seen a bit with Team USA lately, Covid isn’t a completely spent force and Duke target Kyle Filipowski learned that lesson in North Augusta, S.C., as he’ll have to leave after testing positive.

There’s good news for Filpowski too though. First, he has already made his bones as a recruit and everyone understands that he’s a very promising young player.

And second, as a young man who is in superb physical condition, Filipowski statistically has very little to fear personally from Covid. The peak hospitalization rate for adolescents from Covid peaked in January at 2.1 per 100,000 cases; in April it was 1.3 per 100,000.

As of July 7th, total deaths from Covid from 0-17 are 331 people out of about 597,000.

As we now know, there are multiple factors in people getting seriously sick, notably obesity and other underlying comorbidities and deaths are concentrated at the higher ends of the age spectrum: 80 percent of fatalities are people who are over 65 and 95 percent are people who are over 45.

None of this is a comfort to people who are more at risk or who have lost loved ones, and obviously Filipowski has to worry about other people and older family members whom he might infect or someone he’s traveling with.

As most of you know, the Delta variant has become a significant complication but the good news is that at least the vaccines from Pfizer and AstraZeneca seem to hold up well against it.

So odds are this will be a brief concern for Filipowski and his family and he’ll be back to his normal life in a few days or weeks, hopefully even asymptomatic.

We just wish everyone could be as fortunate.