Well this pandemic situation is just getting weirder and weirder. It really is a war right now, which we thought we had finally won when we had announcements of three different vaccines coming on the market.
But Covid-19 immediately responded by mutating into a more virulent and contagious strain, and yet another mutation has been found in Japan which is half-resistant to vaccines.
So now we are all being told to “Act like you’ve got it”, which means that you should avoid any contact with anyone at all in close quarters, which is a tad difficult on a football pitch.
So far the government has supported the continuation of Elite Sport to keep the masses entertained, but the government is not happy that footballers are not following social distancing guidelines whenever possible, especially when celebrating a goal together.
The government’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam has said that all social contact is “avoidable” and wants to see footballers taking that seriously. He said in the Mirror: “I completely agree with you (that footballers shouldn’t come together for celebrations).
“We are in a very dangerous place now… This is like saying I’m building a big perimeter fence around my property so that the baddies can’t get in.
“But you can’t celebrate that when you’ve put three posts in and two sections of fence – or maybe a bit more in the case of the NHS so far. Because people just go round the fence.
“You’ve got to build the whole fence. And we cannot relax until we’ve got a very substantially vaccinated population.
“And until then, we are in a dangerous place… Every close human contact that is avoidable should be avoided because one in three of us will get the infection and have no symptoms at all.
“So I’m afraid, yes, on the football point, on the sporting point, I do agree with you.”
“I think elite sport is important because these are tough times, and being able to watch the football on the telly is really important because there’s loads of things that you can’t do, and watching it from the comfort of your own home is a perfectly safe activity.
“I know that the Premier League really think hard about this.
“It’s important that it is carried out in a way that is respectful of the rules.
“Now of course they have special arrangements to ensure that the players are safe and they have a testing regime, but I do think that it’s important that everybody respects, not just the letter but the spirit of the rules because it’s actually the spirit of the rules that’s important, which is don’t pass on the disease, act as if you’ve got it and then you won’t pass it on to others.”
As the government says, a third of people who are positive don’t get any visible symptons at all, so it is possible that some players could be carriers on the pitch, but haven’t tested positive straight away.
But, seriously, how do you stop the players celebrating an important goal?