| It's becoming clearer that Covid-19 can affect a person's heart. How often that occurs and exactly what that means remains a mystery, however. For athletes, that knowledge gap can be especially challenging. This weekend's start of the NFL season capped a mostly triumphant return from lockdown for professional sports in the U.S., where the coronavirus continues to infect tens of thousands every day. While two major collegiate conferences scrapped fall sports, the rest have already started playing. Concerns about possible long-term health effects, including a dangerous heart inflammation, forced some schools to reconsider the risks. A new Ohio State University study of 26 student athletes found evidence of the injury in four of them, raising fresh concerns and heightening calls to screen athletes who caught the coronavirus before clearing them to play. "Depending on the level of exercise, they need to go slow and increase gradually and obviously report any symptoms," said Garry Jennings, a cardiologist and executive director of Sydney Health Partners, an Australian medical research group.  Kansas City Chiefs Quarterback Patrick Mahomes. The NFL is back in action, even as players grapple with unknown health risks from Covid-19. Photographer: Adam Glanzman/Getty Images North America Dr. Stephen Andrew McCullough, cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian, offers some skepticism. The study didn't examine the athletes' hearts before their coronavirus infections, nor did it include people who didn't catch the virus—omissions McCullough says make it impossible to draw conclusions. "We're doing cardiac MRIs in people with Covid when we don't know what normal looks like," McCullough said. Regardless, heart concerns are dominating Dr. Julia Iafrate's conversations with athletes. Iafrate, an assistant professor and director of dance medicine at Columbia University in New York, tries to remind people they are seeing research unfold in real time. What is accurate today might not be in a few months. That makes deciding whether to take the field a tough call. Like people faced with returning to the office or the classroom, athletes are grappling with a new risk calculus. It could be the toughest opponent they ever face.—Angelica LaVito | 
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