At least 41 Covid-19 deaths linked to Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid

41 Covid-19 deaths linked to Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid

The Sunday Times have a long feature this weekend explaining why Britain has been so badly hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

The UK has the 4th highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in the world: 258,509.

36,757 Britons have officially died from the coronavirus, which is the second-highest number of fatalities of any country in the world.

(Data from John Hopkins University.)

SUNDAY TIMES: Johnson refuses to throw his top aide ‘to the dogs’ #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/puD6NRGfZh

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) May 23, 2020

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March 11, 2020 will forever be marked in the history books with regard to how Covid-19 spread in England.

On that day, Atletico Madrid knocked Liverpool out of the Champions League at Anfield.

3,000 Atletico fans travelled to Liverpool to watch the game, despite the fact that Spain were in lockdown at the time.

However, the UK were far slower in implementing quarantine measures.

The government allowed this Champions League game to go ahead, and these fans were allowed to travel from one of the epicentres of the virus at the time.

On April 20, Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser Angela Maclean was asked whether the Liverpool-Atletico Madrid match should have gone ahead. She said:

That’s certainly an interesting hypothesis that you’ve raised.

It will be very interesting to see in the future, when all the science is done, what relationship there is between the viruses that have circulated in Liverpool and the viruses that have circulated in Spain.

“That’s certainly an interesting hypothesis that you’ve raised”.

Angela Maclean, Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser, when asked by @LiamThorpECHO if on reflection it was a mistake to allow Liverpool v Atletico Madrid & Cheltenham Festival last month as the coronavirus crisis grew pic.twitter.com/akyChN7LIG

— Dan Roan (@danroan) April 20, 2020

Today, Angela Maclean has received an answer to this “interesting hypothesis” in the Sunday Times.

In a shocking revelation, it’s claimed that at least 41 people died from Covid-19 as a result of the Liverpool versus Atletico match:

According to the Imperial College London and Oxford University estimates, Spain had 640,000 infections at the time compared with 100,000 in Britain, although it was just a week ahead in terms of the spread of the virus such was its unchecked growth across the UK during that period.

Edge Health, which analyses health data for the NHS, carried out modelling that estimated that the match and the Cheltenham festival are linked to 41 and 37 additional deaths respectively at nearby hospitals between 25 and 35 days later, compared with similar hospital trusts that were used as a control. And that was just the local hospitals.

The Sunday Times #Insight investigation into how Boris Johnson’s dithering on lockdown cost 1000s of lives is utterly devastating.
If you’ve been blindly supporting him & the Govt during this crisis, read this article & then decide if you still want to. It’s shocking. 👇 pic.twitter.com/fB8wK2P1Hq

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) May 24, 2020

 

Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid: Problems with tracking Covid-19 deaths

Back in April, a report from Jonathan Kay was published in Quillette magazine on whether the Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid match could be labelled a Covid-19 superspreading event.

In that article, Jonathan Kay concluded that that question remained up in the air due to basic failings on the part of the UK government:

Was Liverpool’s March 11 football match against Atletico Madrid an SSE, as many believe?

Possibly. But no one knows, because the study of COVID-19 SSEs is bedevilled by the same sloppy contact-tracing practices and inadequate testing resources as has hampered the public-health response to the disease more generally.

For @Quillette, I created a database of COVID19 superspreader events in 28 countries. The underlying activities turned out to be very similar. There’s a defined set of human behaviors that cause COVID19 to spread rapidly. But it seems to be a *narrow* set.https://t.co/oR4x30gufR

— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) April 23, 2020

 

1985 Heysel Stadium disaster & 1989 Hillsborough disaster

The findings of the Sunday Times mean that the Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid match killed more people than the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster.

On that occasion, a horrific 39 people lost their lives before the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus.

In 1989, on FA Cup semi-final day, 96 Liverpool fans died in a crush during the match against Nottingham Forest.

 

Also see: Carlo Ancelotti agrees with Jurgen Klopp: Playing Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid was ‘criminal’.

Jurgen Klopp claims coronavirus affected Liverpool’s preparations ahead of Atletico defeat.

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