Irene Aldana and former UFC Women’s Bantamweight Champion Holly Holm were supposed to headline this weekend’s Fight Night card, but Aldana tested positive for the coronavirus and the bout was canned for the time being.
The fighter says that she started feeling coronavirus symptoms while training for the Holm fight and then a pair of tests came back positive.
“Yeah, it’s a very sad thing,” Aldana said on the Hablemos MMA podcast (via Danny Segura of MMA Junkie). “The truth is that I was very excited, and I was ready for that fight on August 1st, but unfortunately I started feeling the symptoms: headache, fever, body aches. I decided to take the test so I could make sure, and it turned out positive. We were in contact with the UFC, and we were waiting for a second test just to be sure, and the second test came back positive. Right now I’m focused on recovering, and I feel better, but not 100 percent. It seems I’m getting better, so right now just focused on the recovery so I can start training again.”
Holm and Aldana are next expected to headline a Fight Night card on October 3, but it hasn’t been made official at this time.
Aldana wants everyone to know that the coronavirus is something that should be taken seriously and not something to be dismissed.
“It’s very important, and I’m happy to use my experience and this platform to tell people,” Aldana said. “I was in the best shape of my life. I was ready for five rounds. I was training two, three times a day. My diet was on point. My nutritionists were sending me a very healthy and measured diet. I disinfected everything. I was only training at home. The truth is that I took all preventive measures and even then we caught it. So you can’t be too confident because you’re young and you take care of yourself or have no underlying conditions. I’m not diabetic or obese, which are some of the conditions of high risk, and even then I had a very rough time, and I still have some existing effects. I still have the virus in me, and I’m still battling with it. The fact that I’m an athlete, and I have a healthy diet, I didn’t need a respirator, I didn’t need to say goodbye to my family to go to a hospital, so it’s something we need to take seriously and not dismiss it.”
WorldOMeters reports that 16,975,544 people worldwide have been diagnosed with the coronavirus and 665,078 of those folks died due to the virus.
