Burnley coach Ian Woan among six positive Premier League Covid-19 tests
The Premier League has been buoyed in its attempts to complete the season, after only six of 748 players and staff tested positive for Covid-19. The Burnley assistant manager, Ian Woan, was on Tuesday night confirmed as one of the six.
A first round of results from 19 clubs provided welcome news for the league. With the testing system in operation clubs started to return to training on Tuesday, albeit while observing physical distancing. The low rate of positive results will add heft to the league’s attempts to persuade players that theirs is a safe environment in which to return to work.
Woan, said by Burnley to be asymptomatic and “safe and well at home”, is the only one of the six to test positive who has been named. All the individuals will be expected to isolate for seven days. The 20th club completed testing on Tuesday and their figures will be included in the results from a second round of testing, due to be published on Saturday.
The Bundesliga, which restarted last Saturday, announced 10 positive tests in early May from 1,724 tests on players and staff at clubs in the top two tiers, equating to 0.58% of tests being positive to the Premier League’s 0.8%. On 10 May, La Liga said five players in Spain’s top two divisions had tested positive, without naming how many had been tested.
Focus now turns back to the process of creating medical protocols, with the next task a plan for the safe introduction of contact training. This is likely to prove the most controversial part of Project Restart, with Watford’s Troy Deeney – who has said he will refuse to return to training over safety concerns – having articulated the fears of many players over risks to their health and that of their families.
The left-back Danny Rose, on loan at Newcastle from Tottenham, has aired similar concerns to Deeney. Newcastle went back to training on Tuesday but Rose was wary to return. “People are suggesting we should go back to football, like we’re guinea pigs or lab rats,” he told the Lockdown Tactics podcast. “We’ve going to experiment this phase and see if it works or not.
“I can just imagine people at home saying: ‘Well, they earn that amount of money, so they should be going back.’ For stuff like that, I think: ‘Is it worth the hassle?’ I could be potentially risking my health for people’s entertainment and that’s not something I want to be involved in if I’m honest.”
On Tuesday Chelsea’s Callum Hudson-Odoi trained after he was reportedly arrested in the early hours of Sunday.
The Premier League hopes to complete a return to contact training in short order. It is to meet representatives from the Department for Digital, Culture,
Media and Sport and public health officials this week to discuss the protocols needed to enable “stage two” of a return for elite sport, rules that will incorporate physical contact.
Once government approves a rubric for guidelines, the league will consult with players, managers and the Professional Footballers’ Association before finalising bespoke rules. The league hopes to finish the protocol by the time the 20 shareholder clubs meet next Tuesday, when it would be put to a vote.
The timeline will not get any less frantic should that vote pass, with further considerations needed on how to make matches safe behind closed doors, issues that include resolving discussions with police about the use of home venues. There is an acceptance in the league and within government that the end of June is looking more likely for a possible return, with Friday 26 a possible new date.
As the process of discussion and debate continues, players and staff – up to 40 a time from each club – will be tested twice a week. In charge of operating the testing procedure is Prenetics, a Hong Kong company whose UK arm had previously specialised in DNA testing.
“It’s not just a test it’s an overall process,” said their chief executive, Avi Lasarow, whose company has formed a consortium with the London-based laboratory TDL to process results. “Our role as a company is to provide a goldstandard solution by essentially delivering the ability to collect the samples safely with registered healthcare professionals, make sure those samples get to the lab for analysis under a strict chain of custody and then report that out via a secure technology infrastructure.”
Lasarow said their testing procedure had proven effective in Hong Kong and promised an overall accuracy of 98.8%. He said Prenetics had had conversations with the UK government about providing testing for public health, but was not currently doing so. “I would like to confirm that there’s absolutely no possibility of the tests being provided in the private sector impinging on what the frontline workers and NHS staff are actually needing,” he said.