Eagles’ Doug Pederson Tests Positive For COVID-19

Eagles head coach Doug Pederson will spend some time away from the team after testing positive for COVID-19 (Twitter link via Tim McManus of ESPN.com). In the interim, assistant head coach Duce Staley will assume HC duties at the team’s complex, as Jeff McLane of the Philadelphia Inquirer tweets

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Pederson, 52, has not experienced any symptoms, but he’ll quarantine to avoid spreading the virus, per the protocols. The league’s guidelines mandate multiple tests for Pederson before he can get back to work.

Person is the second head coach known to have contracted the coronavirus, following Sean Payton‘s positive test earlier this year. Payton’s recovery was relatively quick – he tested positive on March 16 and he was cleared before the end of the month.

You fatigue real easy,” Payton said of his experience with the virus. “I’d be up moving around, doing something, then you’d want to lay down again. That lasted three or four days. By the time I got the test results back I had begun feeling better. I had my appetite back.”

Pederson is set to enter his fifth year as the Eagles’ head coach. Staley, a longtime Eagles running back, joined the team as an assistant in 2011 and worked his way up to AHC in 2018.

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