[Albion] The NHS V The Premier League - what is more important ?

brianwade said:

Currently the Premier League players/ staff are being tested for COVID 19 twice a week and that equates to around 2000 tests a week.

Many NHS staff in Brighton have not been tested at all .

My wife had to self isolate in early April as she had symptoms . Shes works in an operating theatre at the RSC Brighton . She has not had a test yet and , like most of her colleagues , was not offered a test whilst she was ill. She now has an antibody test booked for the middle of July ( in one month - a limited number are available ) . You would have hoped tests for staff would have been conducted at the hospital regularly and sent to the homes of those self isolating . ( this may be happening now - however I would be surprised ).

So if Premier League players are being tested twice a week - NHS staff should be tested at least once every two weeks . The government and the Premier Leagues' priority is clearly to provide a watered down "opium for the people " event whilst turning a blind eye to the NHS staff testing and hoping the virus won't come back in hospitals .
Am I the only one that thinks this scenario is wrong ? By all means play the soulless footy matches so we don't have to pay shit loads of money back to the broadcasters - but for goodness sake let's get our priorities right and make sure there is regular and adequate testing for NHS staff before we do that .

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Pierre the Painter said:

I'll bite. The PL tests are privately sourced and paid for by the PL, they have no impact on the number of test currently available to the country as a whole. As a proportion currently we are able to test 220,000 people daily, so 1,540,000 weekly the PL proportion of those tests is 0.001%. However one is not directly linked to the other, if the PL were still not taking place we would not have any extra capacity to test NHS staff and currently capacity exceeds tests undertaken each day so there would be no direct or indirect benefit of testing any other part of the nation if we stopped the PL and the tests. Indeed although it is a tiny number, the PL has so far detected 14 positive cases amongst its players and staff, all of these would have otherwise gone undetected and potentially spead the disease (plus the fact that miraculously positive results have dipped as players returned, dare I say they have become more socially responsible on returning to their jobs).

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Harry Wilson's tackle said:

It could be argued that if it is that easy for football clubs to source and pay for repeated frequent testing, they could surely put their hands in their pockets to make the same available for front line health workers.

Moreover, if private testing capacity exists, why doesn't the government direct money towards ensuring it is used to test more frontline health workers?

The bottom line is that NHS staff cannot be not being tested sufficiently frequently (or at all) due to the lack of capacity, as you imply, if PL footy players can be tested twice a week, and the latter must be taking away from the former. It is a zero sum equation.

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Harry Wilson's tackle said:

It could be argued that if it is that easy for football clubs to source and pay for repeated frequent testing, they could surely put their hands in their pockets to make the same available for front line health workers.

Moreover, if private testing capacity exists, why doesn't the government direct money towards ensuring it is used to test more frontline health workers?

The bottom line is that NHS staff cannot be not being tested sufficiently frequently (or at all) due to the lack of capacity, as you imply, if PL footy players can be tested twice a week, and the latter must be taking away from the former. It is a zero sum equation.

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Pierre the Painter said:

Yes but you know the economics of testing only work because the revenue is available through the TV funding upon season restarting to support it. Stop the season and that money isn't available (some 4 million in total I believe to carry out all tests to the end of the season).

I can't speak on behalf of the government but we know that approximately 220,000 tests are able to be carried out daily, yesterday the figure was 170,000 so there are hundreds of thousands in capacity weekly not being utlised. The argument over 2,000 PL tests taking place to get an industry within the UK going is neither here nor there.

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dazzer6666 said:

Is it ? There is seemingly excess capacity now for antigen testing........unlike early April when the OP's wife was ill. Presumably she's now not ill, and is back at work, so an antigen test would be pretty pointless. PL tests are antigen not antibody so not comparable.........

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Harry Wilson's tackle said:

Regarding your last point if not all the tests are being deployed this is the result either of government policy (which would be a scandal if true) or due to the lack of capacity in the NHS to run the tests (which is either incompetance or the product of tory underfunding - ether way, also a scandal). The fact is we all need to be tested regularly so we can isolate carriers - that would kill the pandemic stone dead in 2 weeks.

It doesn't matter where the clubs are getting the money they need to jump the queue, but they are jumping the queue. If the government (i.e., the taxpayer) took up all the available tests that are being used by the players then more front line workers would be being tested (with the caveat related to the scandal I noted above). As I said it is a zero sum game.

I appreciate that without the tests football would not restart and I can accept an argument that the benefit from restarting (to the national morale) is worth the queue jumping associated with the testing. That's not your argument, though. I no more accept that it is irrelevant (as you seem to be suggesting) than I accept that private medicine has no impact on the NHS (I have worked in a university department in a major teaching hospital for 35 years, and have seen how private practice leaches on the NHS).

Incidentally is it not the case (albeit this is not a necessary part of my argument) that there is no private medicine at the moment as it was all seconded by the government when Covid hit? If so the clubs are de facto stealing tests from the NHS.

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Pierre the Painter said:

Fully with you on the first point, not sure I quite go as far as scandal but certainly incompetence. The government set itself a test to be able to conduct 200,000 tests daily by the end of May, it claimed it had met that test so if we take the government on its word (I know, I know....) then it has capability of conducting over 14m tests daily. The issue seems to be with its strategy of testing than that of capacity.

Once it is fully utilizing capacity you are right in that it can requisition the 2,000 weekly tests the PL carries out for the greater good (and indeed any other private tests available), I'm still not convinced how 20,000 extra tests over 10 weeks on a population of over 65 million will have any significant impact. It also needs to weigh up not just the benefit of these 20,000 extra tests which will cost them 4.5m or 225 pounds each, it is the potential financial impact on the PL. If it were to take this capacity from the PL thus forcing it to abandon its season there is a likelihood as the PL take a 1 billion hit that players would have to take pay cuts, if they were to take just a 10% paycut that is approx. 1.4m in taxes to the exchequer weekly it could lose out on, or 14 million in those 10 weeks in taxes which in turn pay for our nurses, our testing, vaccines etc.

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Harry Wilson's tackle said:

It could be argued that if it is that easy for football clubs to source and pay for repeated frequent testing, they could surely put their hands in their pockets to make the same available for front line health workers.

Moreover, if private testing capacity exists, why doesn't the government direct money towards ensuring it is used to test more frontline health workers?

The bottom line is that NHS staff cannot be not being tested sufficiently frequently (or at all) due to the lack of capacity, as you imply, if PL footy players can be tested twice a week, and the latter must be taking away from the former. It is a zero sum equation.

Click to expand...

dazzer6666 said:

You've lost me on the maths a bit there........200,000 would be 1.4m per week ? .......so would still take a year to test the entire population (once - let alone accounting for the numbers that are being repeat tested, often multiple times)

Agree it certainly looks like incompetence though - particularly early on in the pandemic when everything was telling them to 'test, test, test'. Hopefully they have got this closer to where it needs to be now for all those being 'traced' so they can get tested asap and not have to stay in isolation.

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Pierre the Painter said:

Fully with you on the first point, not sure I quite go as far as scandal but certainly incompetence. The government set itself a test to be able to conduct 200,000 tests daily by the end of May, it claimed it had met that test so if we take the government on its word (I know, I know....) then it has capability of conducting over 14m tests daily. The issue seems to be with its strategy of testing than that of capacity.

Once it is fully utilizing capacity you are right in that it can requisition the 2,000 weekly tests the PL carries out for the greater good (and indeed any other private tests available), I'm still not convinced how 20,000 extra tests over 10 weeks on a population of over 65 million will have any significant impact. It also needs to weigh up not just the benefit of these 20,000 extra tests which will cost them 4.5m or 225 pounds each, it is the potential financial impact on the PL. If it were to take this capacity from the PL thus forcing it to abandon its season there is a likelihood as the PL take a 1 billion hit that players would have to take pay cuts, if they were to take just a 10% paycut that is approx. 1.4m in taxes to the exchequer weekly it could lose out on, or 14 million in those 10 weeks in taxes which in turn pay for our nurses, our testing, vaccines etc.

Click to expand...

Harry Wilson's tackle said:

It could be argued that if it is that easy for football clubs to source and pay for repeated frequent testing, they could surely put their hands in their pockets to make the same available for front line health workers.

Moreover, if private testing capacity exists, why doesn't the government direct money towards ensuring it is used to test more frontline health workers?

The bottom line is that NHS staff cannot be not being tested sufficiently frequently (or at all) due to the lack of capacity, as you imply, if PL footy players can be tested twice a week, and the latter must be taking away from the former. It is a zero sum equation.

Click to expand...

brianwade said:

Currently the Premier League players/ staff are being tested for COVID 19 twice a week and that equates to around 2000 tests a week.

Many NHS staff in Brighton have not been tested at all .

My wife had to self isolate in early April as she had symptoms . Shes works in an operating theatre at the RSC Brighton . She has not had a test yet and , like most of her colleagues , was not offered a test whilst she was ill. She now has an antibody test booked for the middle of July ( in one month - a limited number are available ) . You would have hoped tests for staff would have been conducted at the hospital regularly and sent to the homes of those self isolating . ( this may be happening now - however I would be surprised ).

So if Premier League players are being tested twice a week - NHS staff should be tested at least once every two weeks . The government and the Premier Leagues' priority is clearly to provide a watered down "opium for the people " event whilst turning a blind eye to the NHS staff testing and hoping the virus won't come back in hospitals .
Am I the only one that thinks this scenario is wrong ? By all means play the soulless footy matches so we don't have to pay shit loads of money back to the broadcasters - but for goodness sake let's get our priorities right and make sure there is regular and adequate testing for NHS staff before we do that .

Click to expand...

Weststander said:

The Albion were heading for an incredibly large loss this season if null and voided, £50m? By investing a few £100k in testing, Tony Bloom will mitigate that loss by many millions. I don’t blame him for going down that road, why should he unnecessarily have to put in £10m’s of his own money, when there was a solution. Prenetics are running all this for the Bundesliga and PL, and are adamant that it hasn’t taken away the resources they already devote to the NHS.

The economies of covid hit nations across Europe are moving on apace, with retail, construction and other sectors open for weeks now or about to be, and as PB recently stated (in that interview we all heard) football is a business not just leisure and should be allowed to resume when safe to do so. It looks like it will be safe thanks to the hard work that’s gone in, we certainly aren’t hearing any complaints now from Deeney or Rose. Will Hughes on the radio this morning said that Deeney’s fears had now been dispelled, he’s training ferociously. All the NSC naysayers (95% of posters) confidently said this season would never restart. The acumen of 20 incredibly focused owners and CEO’s ignored all the noise, and got the job done.

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vegster said:

I agree wholeheartedly that this situation is very wrong. I heard interviews with several players recently that felt bad if the tests they were having deprived NHS staff of test kits. There seems to be an agenda to try to get back to normal asap whatever the cost.

Once again this comes down to money, Premiership clubs and broadcasters are losing lots of money all the time football is suspended but, equally, clubs are bricking it that their assets, the players, might contract Covid-19 and not successfully recover thus costing potential £millions in losses and insurance claims. You only have to look at the undignified arguments over poor old Sala to see what could happen if someone contracts Covid-19 during a game.

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