Nearly three months after helping the Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif is on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Chiefs’ right guard, the first medical doctor to play in the NFL after earning his doctor of medicine degree in 2018, said in Sports Illustrated that he took a vacation with his girlfriend to celebrate the Super Bowl win. When he returned home to Canada, everything had changed.
After a 14-day quarantine, he knew he had to put his medical training to use. Canada’s health ministry had recently launched a campaign to recruit health care professionals and medical students to help fight the pandemic. Duvernay-Tardif quickly signed up.
“First, I registered for a crash course, where I reviewed the basics of how to put a surgical gown on and learn all the steps for sanitizing, because that stuff is more important than ever, to protect not only yourself but your patients,” Duvernay-Tardif told Sports Illustrated’s Greg Bishop.
He said he was assigned to a long-term care facility about an hour from his hometown of Montreal. He is currently working in a nursing role, as he hasn’t completed the residency portion of his program and does not yet have a license to practice medicine.
Duvernay-Tardif, whose first day at the facility was on April 24, said in Sports Illustrated that he was nervous, but compared it to the “good nerves” he feels before a big game. He noted, however, that there are major differences between playing football, even in the Super Bowl, and fighting a deadly virus as a health care worker on the front lines.
“Back in February, I knew that 100 million-plus people were going to be watching, and I wanted to win. When you’re going in to help it’s more about your duty as a doctor and a citizen. It’s not the time to be the hero and be impulsive,” he said.
Duvernay-Tardif also weighed in on whether the NFL will return in September, saying it’s too soon to know when sports might come back, noting that the health and well-being of the public is more important.
“What I can say is if we’re not playing in September, knowing all the implications of what sport means for a nation and the money behind this huge industry, there are going to be bigger issues than not playing football,” he said.
