After ‘damaging’ delay to stop sports, UK tries to restart
IT WILL be hard to quantify just how many lives Mikel Arteta saved by contracting the coronavirus.
The Arsenal manager, testing positive on March 12, helped to ensure hundreds of thousands of people – from fans to players and support staff – were no longer at risk of being infected around the following weekend’s English Premier League games.
“All the news we had was from China, then Italy and then Spain,” Arteta recalled. “Then you realise, ‘Wow, everybody can be exposed here.’”
And yet, the British government had been dismissing the danger of sports venues significantly spreading the new coronavirus, telling sports to carry on as usual, even as the pandemic escalated.
It took Arteta being stricken with COVID-19 and Chelsea player Callum Hudson-Odoi testing positive on the same night, forcing both squads into self-isolation, to jolt the world’s richest football competition into self-imposed exile.
TRAINING GROUND REOPENED
As Arsenal reopened part of its training ground for players to run alone on Monday and the Premier League accelerated planning for ‘Project Restart’ with the government, there is increased scrutiny of Downing Street downplaying the potential for sports to exacerbate the outbreak seven weeks ago.
By March 11, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic, Prime Minister Boris Johnson sensed how the decision not to ban sports events appeared increasingly out of step with other countries, particularly Italy. In a video posted on his Twitter account, Johnson reprised his old job as a journalist to interview Dr Jenny Harries, Britain’s deputy chief medical officer.
“Tell us why, so far, the medical advice in this country is not to do that?” Johnson asked.
“In general,” Harries responded about the British model, “those sorts of events, big gatherings, are not seen to be something which is going to have a big effect.”
At the time, only eight deaths from fewer than 500 confirmed coronavirus cases had been recorded in British hospitals. Now the death toll exceeds 20,000.
BRIEFED BY ADVISER
On the day Johnson was briefed by his medical adviser to allow sports to carry on as usual, 60,000 people packed into the Cheltenham horse racing festival and 52,000 supporters went to Liverpool’s Anfield stadium for the visit of Atletico Madrid.
“We don’t want to disrupt people’s lives unduly,” Harries told Johnson, citing British scientific modelling hours before kick-off in Liverpool.
Spain had already started to prohibit mass gatherings, yet 3,000 fans from its capital were able to fly to northwest England for the Champions League match.
It would be another five days before Johnson announced emergency workers would no longer be available for sports events, and a further week for Britain to go into lockdown.
Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said on Monday that he was working with the Premier League “with a view to getting football up and running as soon as possible,” with teams yet to play up to 10 games of the 38-fixture season. The league is planning on mass testing of the hundreds who will still be required at matches, which will be held without spectators.