COVID-19: Liverpool mayor wants Champions League match investigated
Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotherham has called for a full-scale investigation into Atletico Madrid’s visit to his city on 11 March and its impact on the spread of COVID-19.
Atletico and 3,000 travelling fans were allowed to make the trip despite the city of Madrid being a hotspot for COVID-19 in Spain.
Liverpool match should not have gone ahead
The Champions League last sixteen second round match was attended by a near-capacity crowd of 52,000 and Rotherham feels that it may have directly contributed to the spread of the virus.
Liverpool lost the match 3-2, and with it, their shot at defending the Champions League title won in 2019. The effects of staging the match may well have had more grim consequences for both the city and the United Kingdom as a whole.
“We’ve seen an increase in the infection curve and that’s resulted in 1,200 people contracting COVID-19,” Rotherham told the BBC this week.
Rotherham was highly critical of the national government’s slow response to the pandemic and the failure to place a ban on mass gatherings. At the time such gatherings were banned in Spain but fans were still allowed to travel and may have spread the virus in Liverpool.
Linking COVID-19 cases to travelling fans
“That needs to be investigated to find out whether some of those infections are due directly to the Atletico fans. There were coronavirus hot cities, and Madrid was one of those.
“They weren’t allowed to congregate in their own country, but 3,000 of those fans came over to ours, and potentially may well have spread coronavirus.
“So it does need looking at, and it does need the government to take some responsibility for not locking down sooner.”
The British government’s deputy chief scientific adviser, Angela McLean was understandably unwilling to entertain the suggestion that allowing the match to go ahead contributed to the spread of the virus and wouldn’t comment beyond calling the theory an “interesting hypothesis”.
Mayor of Madrid, JosĂ© Luis MartĂnez-Almeida, said earlier in the week that allowing 3,000 fans to travel at that stage was a big mistake and his Liverpool counterpart agrees.
An investigation into the matter will attempt to trace cases of COVID-19 back to the visiting Atletico fans.
“If people have contracted coronavirus as a direct result of a sporting event that we believe should not have taken place, well that is scandalous,” Rotheram said.
“That has put not just those people in danger, but those front-line staff in the NHS and others in their own families that may have contracted it,” he said.
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