Full football stadiums ‘could be 18 months’ away, says expert
Football is unlikely to get back to playing in front of full stadiums until a vaccine is found for coronavirus, according to an an epidemiologist.
The Premier League and football around the world has ground to a halt due to the coronavirus pandemic with a lot of leagues suspended indefinitely, while others have been cancelled.
Professor Karol Sikora, who is testing the effectiveness of a South Korean antibody test, reckons a vaccine for the virus is between 12 and 18 months away and admits the “logistics of immunising 68 million people is profound”.
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With that in mind, Dr Zach Binney – who is an epidemiologist at Emory University in the US city of Atlanta – is struggling to see how 60,000 people would allowed into a football stadium before a vaccine breakthrough.
“The thing that people need to understand, epidemiologically speaking, is that every person you add to a gathering adds risk,” Binney told The Times.
“Five people is more dangerous than two, ten is more dangerous than five, 500 is more dangerous than ten, 60,000 is very, very dangerous. Even if you have really low community-based transmission, it only takes a few people in that crowd of 60,000 for there to be a risk of something very significant happening.
“As a scientist, I hate to say I am ever 100 per cent sure about anything but I am as close to 100 per cent as I’ve ever been that we cannot return to filled-to-capacity stadia until we have a vaccine. Period. The best guess is about 18 months, could be a little more, could be a little less.”
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