Premier League positive tests alarming

Calls for a pause and reset, but schedule is tight

Europe has been an early- warning signal to us on the realities of the coronavirus since last spring.

This was demonstrated quite clearly with professional sports. I vividly remember tuning in to the broadcast of an Italian soccer match in March specifically to see what it was like to see athletes playing in a big stadium without fans. And it was weird: the sounds of the game were amplified, the moments that would have been greeted with shouts of joy ( or anger) from fans instead just had guys on the pitch yelling at each other, there were random shots of bored players on the bench instead of the usual crowd visuals. At the time, it still seemed like it might be a wacky one- off, as northern Italy was the first virus hot spot outside China.

Months later, all those elements of a live-sports event have become depressingly familiar at home.

European soccer also provided a roadmap for the return of sports. Even without implementing the bubble strategies deployed by the National Hockey League and National Basketball Association in the summer, outfits such as the Premier League ( England), Serie A (Italy) and the Bundesliga (Germany) finished their schedules with frequent testing of players and staff and orders that everyone was supposed to avoid high- risk settings. There were slip-ups here and there, but none of those big leagues had anything approaching the gong-show returns of first Major League Baseball and then the National Football League, each of which was balanced on a knife’s edge at points amid positive tests and postponements before skating by to the finish. (Although that remains TBD in the case of the NFL.)

But, the early- warning signal is being fired up again. On Tuesday the Premier League released the results of its latest round of COVID testing: 18 positives among 1,479 tests administered to players and staff. Those numbers on their own don’t seem bad at all, with a positivity rate of just above one per cent. We should be so lucky, says anyone reading the daily reports from their province while letting out another exasperated sigh. But that batch of tests in the EPL covered the period from Dec. 21 to Dec. 27, which also included three match postponements — the first such time that has happened since the league returned in the late spring. A single positive test usually forces a larger number of quarantines within a team, as the close contacts of that test are sorted out, so it doesn’t take much before an organization can’t fill out a match-day lineup.

And, 18 positive tests in a week is a sharp jump from what the Premier League typically reports in its announcements, with single-digit positives in nine of 10 weeks from when training resumed in late summer. The presence of coronavirus around its players and teams was dramatically lower still in the first return from the spring pause: the Premier League reported just 20 positive tests in total from late May to late July, a period that included more than 20,000 tests. It has now had almost the same number of positives in a week that it once had in two months. There have been calls in the United Kingdom for a Premier League pause, one that would ideally stop any further transmission among teams and allow something of a reset before play resumes. But the schedule already is crammed as it is, with a desire to finish ahead of a still- planned Euro 2020 in the summer, and the Premier League has said it is confident that it can continue without further interruptions. There has also been talk of punishing players who violate COVID protocols — several have admitted to attending parties over the holiday season — with suspensions, since the clubs themselves have been reluctant to do so. Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, for example, agreed that defender Benjamin Mendy shouldn’t have had some friends to his house on New Year’s Eve, but he said that many other people in England probably broke lockdown rules, too. Ah. Carry on, then. On a related note, his City team is now up to eight players who have tested positive for COVID in recent days.

All this tells the NHL and the NBA something they already knew: allow players and staff to circulate in the community while there is virus spread in the community, and the potential for outbreaks in a team setting is there, even in a league that once did a bang-up job of keeping COVID out of its environment.

There are some other points worth noting. The U. K. is at a particularly grim moment in the pandemic, with the new, extra- transmissible variant of the virus causing recent infections in that country to dramatically outpace neighbouring countries. That has to be a large part of the explanation for the sudden rise in EPL positives. And, soccer is similar to football in that it expects a number of days of rest in between games, which makes rescheduling postponed matches difficult. It only takes a few misses before the rippled changes become impossible to manage. In the NHL, with its regional divisions in which teams are only ever playing a small number of common opponents anyway, there should be much more flexibility to rearrange makeup dates in the event of a postponement.

Although it’ll certainly be something if, say, Calgary and Edmonton have to play each other eight straight times because of a rash of positives in Toronto and Winnipeg. Even the Battle of Alberta could get tiresome at that rate.

18 POSITIVE TESTS IN A WEEK IS A SHARP JUMP (FOR THE EPL).