It is with in­creas­ing frus­tra­tion Sport­ing Ac­tiv­i­ties has been stopped due to a spike in COVID-19 cas­es. Dr Av­ery Hinds by his own ad­mis­sion stat­ed that sport­ing ac­tiv­i­ties were not di­rect­ly re­spon­si­ble for the spike but it was the in­ter­ac­tions be­fore dur­ing and af­ter such ac­tiv­i­ties.

Let's re­trace to Ju­ly of 2020. Sport­ing ac­tiv­i­ties re­sumed with all pro­to­cols in place with no cas­es at­trib­ut­able to the same. If I re­call, didn't the spike oc­cur weeks af­ter elec­tion cam­paign­ing where the breach­es in health pro­to­cols were clear­ly ev­i­dent for all to see (con­gre­gat­ing of per­sons by the 100s, no mask-wear­ing in pub­lic and on con­tract­ed max­is as well as the con­sump­tion of al­co­hol be­fore, dur­ing and af­ter walk­a­bouts)?  

We are in the midst of an­oth­er spike af­ter per­mis­sions were giv­en for a mul­ti­tude of mass gath­er­ings. On Tues­day last and since beach­es have re­opened there have been 100s of peo­ple on beach­es with no mask-wear­ing, con­gre­gat­ing by bars has met with less en­force­ment and bla­tant breach­es for all to see. Once again sport­ing ac­tiv­i­ties are the first to be tar­get­ed.

The world has found ways of main­tain­ing sport­ing ac­tiv­i­ties in coun­tries with much high­er in­fec­tion rates. At the club lev­el, we have in­vest­ed in dig­i­tal ther­mome­ters to pre-screen chil­dren and hand sani­tis­ers. Kids are not go­ing to bars af­ter train­ing and there­fore kids be­low the age of 18 should be al­lowed to con­tin­ue prac­tic­ing with their re­spec­tive clubs main­tain­ing the max­i­mum al­lo­ca­tion of 22 play­ers.

To the adults (as I do not at­tribute this spike to our kids) in the sport­ing fra­ter­ni­ty, who did not ap­pre­ci­ate the le­nien­cy af­ford­ed by our gov­ern­ment in al­low­ing sport­ing ac­tiv­i­ties and flaunt­ed the health pro­to­cols, shame on you.

Our time has come and gone. We have noth­ing to prove any more, the knees are arthrit­ic and the body is weak. Ob­vi­ous­ly, you cared on­ly about your­selves, your self­ish in­ter­ests (is a 'fete' match so crit­i­cal to our liveli­hood) and did not care about the men­tal and phys­i­cal wel­fare of our kids.

To our kids whose smiles re­turned up­on the re­sump­tion of train­ing, who felt like their lives were re­turn­ing to some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy and have now been plunged back to the depths of de­pres­sion, we as adults failed you and you are owed an apol­o­gy. We all need to do bet­ter, to think of oth­ers and not our pri­vate and self­ish in­ter­ests.

To our gov­ern­ment, you can­not pro­vide ath­let­ic schol­ar­ships or op­por­tu­ni­ties in sports to our kids to pur­sue their goals. Please work with the clubs and stake­hold­ers so we can main­tain sport­ing ac­tiv­i­ties for those un­der the age of 18. The risks of trans­mis­sion, based on sci­en­tif­ic da­ta, is low.

Joseph Elias