Coach K on Preparations for the Coronavirus

Duke coach on how the team is working to prevent the spread

With the Coronavirus spreading and Duke spending plenty of time on planes and shaking hands with fans, concern over ways to avoid infection have been a topic of discussion.

“We had our team meeting a couple days ago,” coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “We got a lot of material the NBA has sent out on how they’re dealing with their players. Our team physician, Dr. (Jeff) Bytomski and Jose (Fonseca, team head athletic trainer) gave a good report on it. Obviously, the main thing is if you do have any signs of sickness, let us know. The washing of hands, sanitize, making sure that maybe even more fist bumps now instead of handshakes, things like that.”

“Our university is well on top of it,” he continued. “We feel good. We haven’t talked about travel for us, because we’re not traveling. I think our league should even take a look at … I know because I say it, it probably won’t be a good thing, but even for the ACC Tournament, how do we handle autographs? How do we handle the interaction with the fans, because you have people from everywhere. I worry a little bit about the players, because they can do stuff (to prevent the spread) on the court, but off the court, a lot of people approach them. I’d like for our guys not to be approached, to be quite frank with you, just from a safety sake, but I wish that would be something our league would talk about. I don’t know if they are. We haven’t gotten any word about that, but I think that should be put on the table at least for discussion. We love our fans, but we’re trying to stay on top of an obviously extreme situation globally. With spring break, where are students will be gone, we talked when they come back, the interaction our guys would have with fellow students. That’s something we’ll have to attack after the ACC Tournament.”