Yet many details for the re-start of competitions, such as whether teams would have to be isolated until the league is finished and what happens if a player tests positive, remain unclear.
As Christoph Freund, sporting director at Austrian champions Salzburg, said on Tuesday: “It can’t be that if one player, or one accompanying person or a trainer, gets the virus that the whole round has to stop, or that things stop again for two or three weeks,” he said.
Germany’s Bundesliga may well be the guinea pig as it is the closest of the major leagues to resuming. Like other leagues, it can only start with a green light from the government.
On Thursday, the Bundesliga said players will be monitored by an appointed team health official and would have regular testing.
An infection to a player will be reported to authorities who will be in charge of any other steps. The team, however, would not be automatically quarantined.
BIG QUESTIONS
Geoff Dreher, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said there was not much point in re-starting if a single case resulted in a whole league being stopped again, while other questions also had to be answered.
“If, on the home team, someone gets sick there, what do you do?” he told Reuters. “If it is on the away team and they are travelling, how do they respond and get back to their home location?”
“Are they happy with potential quarantine, with isolation from friends and family… for an extended period of time? That is a big question,” he added.
“If one of my teammates got the virus, am I okay to continue to play? It (needs) input from a lot of people and I think the reason we don’t have a lot of ideas about this is because people are (still) trying to answer these questions.”
There was also the question of whether there was enough staffing and resources to deal with ill and injured players – a natural risk in soccer.
Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, said one possibility was a ‘bubble’ strategy where players and staff are isolated for the duration of the season.
“The logistics of this would still be difficult,” he told Reuters. “Food has to come from somewhere. Medical care has to come from somewhere. Any contact with the outside world comes at a risk of infection.”
An alternative would be to have a “weak isolation” from the outside world and rely on daily testing throughout the season.
“This could work if testing capacity can be attained and infected individuals test positive before or around the same time they become contagious. If people can transmit while testing negative, this strategy would not work,” he said.
Bergstrom added that the leagues would have to invest in testing to the extent they had excess capacity which they could provide to local communities, including hospitals.
“Otherwise they risk a public relations disaster from taking tests away from those who need them more urgently,” he said.
More than 2.64 million people have been infected by the new coronavirus globally and 184 910 have died.(Goal.com)