Colombian soccer experiment filled with risk
A Canadian doctor is at the centre of efforts to bring back professional soccer in Colombia as soon as early next month.
To be clear, not British Columbia. Colombia, the country in South America, best known for coffee and … other substances.
The story of how Glenn Copeland, director of medical services for the Ottawa Redblacks and one of the team doctors for the Toronto Blue Jays, has come to be involved in the plan to restart Colombia’s top-flight soccer league is one of those that makes the world feel strangely small.
He had a contact at Questcap, a small investment firm in Toronto looking to get involved in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. Someone else had connections in South America, and through them learned that Colombia’s governing soccer body, the Division Mayor del Futbol Colombiano (DIMAYOR), was seeking assistance on a return-to-play strategy. Calls were made, various experts were assembled and a plan began to take shape. Essentially, a guy knew a guy who knew another guy, and that was enough to get things started.
Copeland acknowledges infectious disease is not his specialty. He’s a podiatrist, and says the last few weeks of immersion in the world of COVID-19 have been like learning a new language.
“I’m good with sore feet,” he says.
Discussions that began with a simple question — “How do we get guys on the field safely, and without (causing) spread?” — soon involved more medical professionals, including a leading immunologist at Stanford University. That work led to the development of a plan Copeland and his partners believe will allow the safe resumption of play in Colombia. If it works, it could be a road map for leagues around the world. And if it doesn’t, “We’ll have a lot of people telling us, ‘I told you so,’” Copeland says.
There are no lack of skeptics, including myself, who have written about the challenges of trying to restart a sports league, even in isolation, while dealing with a disease known to be transmissible among people who don’t realize they’re sick. With sports mostly shuttered, leagues are deciding whether to close shop and wait the pandemic out, or try to resume operations while “doing what we can to mitigate the risk as much as possible,” as Copeland says. With baseball resuming its pre-season in Korea, soccer leagues in Europe looking at summer play and the NHL talking openly about playing at selected quarantine sites, it’s evident some are moving toward that latter option.
Colombia is among that group, although it could reverse course as the logistics are hashed out. The country of almost 50 million has a confirmed COVID-19 case count of around 4,500, compared to more than 40,000 in Canada, although its testing rates are extremely low.
The proposed strategy would see everyone involved in staging games without fans in Liga Betplay Dimayor, the Colombian top flight, be tested at the outset for the coronavirus. With 20 teams in the division, and allowing for players, coaches, trainers, and game-operations staff it’s estimated that would include about 1,300 people.
They would all have a PCR test — the nasal swab test — and after a negative result would begin a program of constant medical evaluation and re-evaluation while theoretically sealed off from the outside world. Blood tests that check for the antibodies that fight COVID-19 would be administered daily as a monitoring tool, and if an active case were discovered, that person would be whisked out of the league bubble and sent for treatment or into isolation. Once recovered, they would return.
The risks of such a plan are evident even to a non-doctor. Antibodies develop as the person is fighting the virus, so that person could spread the illness for days before it is spotted in their blood. But the hope is aggressive monitoring would catch such cases before it gets to that point (Spain’s top soccer league is also reportedly planning daily serology tests if it resumes training late next month). Copeland says they cannot expect to have no active cases at all, since so many people are involved. There will be players and coaches and hotel staff and chefs and ball boys and timekeepers and broadcasters.
“The key is to pick up the infected person early,” he says. “The biggest fear is that we pick up a case, and three days later we have five cases on the same team.”
That will be the problem for any league. An active case slips through the monitoring system, and then the whole thing is quickly forced to shut down. Any league that tries to restart before the pandemic is over is only going to have one shot at it.
But the alternative scenario is that a case could be identified and dealt with before the precarious isolation schemes collapse like a Jenga stack. That will be the reality for any sport that returns, whether in a month or a year from now.
It is quite an experiment they are planning in Colombia. Other leagues will be watching with great interest.