After ‘damaging’ delay to stop sports, U.K. 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 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 realize, ‘Wow, everybody can be exposed here.’”
And yet, the British government had dismissed the danger of sports venues significantly spreading the 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 selfisolation, to jolt the world’s richest football competition into self-imposed exile.
As Arsenal reopened part of its training ground for players to run alone 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 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.
At the time, only eight deaths from fewer than 500 confirmed cases had been recorded in British hospitals. Now the death toll exceeds 20,000.
“We don’t want to disrupt people’s lives unduly,” Harries told Johnson.
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.
“There was a mistake made in terms of the governmental advice permitting these events,” said Prof. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “Mass gatherings should have been shut down much earlier as well as nonessential travel. I think those delays in those early weeks were quite damaging.”
Culture Secretary Olivier Dowden said 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 season. The league is planning on mass testing of the hundreds who will be required at matches, which will be held without spectators.
There was an element of normality returning to British sport, with a news conference staged by Watford even as the government maintains extreme social distancing by having reporters call into Downing Street briefings.