Covid and Balls Sports

Covid – How Were Ball Sports put back on?

During the depths of COVID-19, amateur cricket and tennis was banned due to the fear that it would spread disease, on top of golf having heavy restrictions. (For example, people could not touch each other’s balls, or the flagstick) . Although cricket and tennis was still taking place at a professional level, largely due to spectators being removed, and enhanced COVID testing to prevent the spread, this was not viable at an amateur level. This created an impact on the sporting front in multiple ways. It impacted quality of live, as well as hindering junior and amateur development. But some incredible men and women had a thesis to disprove that high-speed non-contact ball sports could spread COVID.

Their reasoning was quite simple. In order for, let’s say, a cricket ball, to spread a disease it would have to first get on the cricket ball, then be bounced at around 65 miles per hour, then come off exactly when someone picked it up. This should be a problem as the virus would have to be sticky under extreme conditions, and not sticky under regular ones, something which didn’t make straightforward sense at the time.

So, they came up with an incredibly straightforward experiment for it. Their original plan was to put spiked, harmless covid on a cricket ball and play a dummy game with a cricket ball. But there were two issues. Firstly, cricket at the time was quite simply, banned. In addition to this, there was naturally very few volunteers due to quarantine and other covid related issues. So they came up with a much simpler test. One which was overestimating a regular game, in the hope that if it negative, the evidence would be much more compelling.

So, they put approximately 20x of normal concentration and 10x the spit volume of an infected human, bounced it five times on the floor, and then try and get a positive result on a cotton swab. After many tests, this turned out to be negative, much to the scientists relief. But, they needed to figure out what could create a positive result. They required 250x the regular volume. Although this number seems so large it's insignificant, it does show that even while at a Normal level it turns out to be negative, at an extreme, a positive does exist.

But then there is a huge obstacle. Sure, you can get all the negative results you want, but the problem with that is you've got to get the actual rule up to the British government to be changed. So, the protagonists of our story talked to the Liverpool Schools of Tropical medicine, and they promised to get the change done. All looked very well until one day before, where, as you'd expect, everything fell off a cliff.

The day before all the change happened, Boris Johnson was asked about cricket, and the areas surrounded Covid, and he quite simply disregarded it as a "vector of disease" despite the Tory biased newspapers all saying otherwise, and that a game of cricket was extremely safe, one sentence from such a powerful figure obviously threw the plans into the wall, despite him using the same phrase the same day about a different thing, showing he clearly just likes the phrase! So, how could we get this show back on the road.

Multiple suggestions were put on the table, some being more drastic than the others. Rightly, they were fuming, so they nearly decided to make Mike Atherton write an article for the times denouncing the PM, effectively telling the population that “Boris Johnson doesn’t have a clue what was going on.” Thank god, they were dissuaded by both Liverpool and SAGE, the organisation they were working with at the time. They were convinced that the PM was not properly briefed, and that once he was, the decision would be made "within a week". Thankfully, for us, it was.

So, after this very long story I’ve just made you read, what conclusion can we all draw from this?

Well, firstly, I think it goes to show that one sentence from an extremely powerful person, can destroy the work of millions, and that we should all be thinking twice about what everyone says, especially without quoted sources. Secondly, I think that it should provoke everyone to question what is taken as “real”, as everyone assumed that it was a fact that cricket was dangerous, when in fact, it turned out not to be. I also think that it raises the question wether flying and theatre were as dangerous as said, as there were no mass infection events, despite tales in the time.

Kit Davies

9 Oct,

Sources: An email and call from a head investor who worked on the project.