ICC biosafety head: 'We don't want to cancel tournaments, we just want to have them safely'
Dr Dave Musker talks about the risks facing the T20 World Cup and the steps taken to mitigate them ahead of the tournament
The way I look at that is how many links you've got in the chain. If you have two teams, you've only got two links in the chain in one [biosafe] environment. If you have, for example, eight teams in the IPL - which is not our tournament but we have taken learnings from - you have got a significant additional complexity. So every additional link, every team, every different venue, you are adding a new complexity. None of this is straightforward, but tournament cricket, or franchise leagues, are much more tricky than bilateral series.
It is probably helpful to say what the two real marks of a successful biosafety plan are. One is education - that everybody buys into the concept, understands what they are trying to achieve. It cannot be an external stricture. And the second one is discipline. They go hand in glove - people understand what's going on, and they comply with directions to keep themselves and all participants safe. If you get those two things right, then you are likely to be in a safe environment. Where one or the other fails, that's when you tend to have breaches and it becomes extremely tricky.
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I'm fascinated to see how the IPL works in India over the coming weeks. We will be travelling to India on April 26 to see the arrangements there and are in touch with the BCCI on this. It is on top of our list of priorities. Some of our teams have already travelled to Delhi in the past and gathered significant learnings from there.
I was in the UK last year and I was very impressed by the rigour and the compliance around the biosecure bubble as it was then at the Ageas bowl and at Old Trafford. And it will be fair to say that the ECB have got a track record and experience of running biosafe environments for cricket.
Most of the time we are planning three to four months in advance. So what it's like in the UK at the moment is interesting, but I'm speaking to the ECB about our predictions for June. That's the first thing: what you see at the moment isn't necessarily what you are planning against - you are looking at the future.
Two things, really. Absolutely critically, it is about understanding your players and who you are playing with. Because one thing we do know is that playing in biosecure environments takes a toll on everyone's well-being. So my first key message will be to look after each other. Because these people are living and working together, they know each other well and they will know if somebody is struggling or they need some support. The second thing is, if you are unsure or you have any questions, ask, test us, make sure that our plans are robust.
Could be, might not be. The way the IPL is managed, they only have two venues engaged at one time. You haven't got eight venues at one time. One of the reasons for going to India is to take the cricket across a cricket-loving country so everybody can see their heroes live. There is a tension between doing that and staging the event in a way that is as secure as possible for everybody, that's why we haven't published or really got into the detail of the staging venues. If the IPL works with this two-venue caravan model, then it is clearly a good starting point for us to understand how we may stage the men's T20 World Cup.
You strive not to have cases in the bubble, because you look at cleansing and sanitising pre-travel [before joining the bubble], managed isolation with testing, good social distancing, and the use of health mitigation measures on travel. And then on arrival, a period of time where there is strict isolation inside hotel rooms, along with testing. So you should clear people before they enter into the team environment. And that has proved successful: look at the IPL last year, look at India's tour of Australia, look at England's series at home last summer, to cite a few examples.
One of our medical advisory groups is involved in international basketball. They had a team that was fully vaccinated and somebody came down with Covid-19. It was treated like severe flu because they had been vaccinated - they were put in their rooms and they recovered and were allowed back into the tournament. We have detailed protocols to deal with positive cases. But the key issue is to make sure that when you are actually setting up the bio-bubble, it is effective and people are safe within.
At some point there will be a phenomenon called "vaccine escape" - the virus will mutate to a position where the current crop of vaccines will have limited impact upon transmission or effectiveness. That will happen, but that's why you are seeing so much about second- generation vaccination. All the vaccines have a wide spread of efficacy against various mutations, but all of them do offer significant mitigation, in that you are unlikely to get very sick if you are vaccinated, regardless of mutations and variants.
Yes. And we will recommend, I suppose, a Covid scientific advisory committee with a qualified medical epidemiologist and probably me as the chief Covid compliance officer to make sure we have the right scientific advice during the tournament.
It's too far away. The key thing to me is that we keep learning and we keep listening. We are stronger working together with the other boards and people and our colleagues in the BCCI. The critical thing is, we work together as a cricketing community, so we can put the game on. We are fans as well. I don't want to cancel tournaments. I want to see live cricket. We are passionate about cricket. And we are passionate about putting on tournaments, we just want to do it safely.
Nagraj Gollapudi is news editor at ESPNcricinfo