Yes, football has effectively gone into lockdown – but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should too

Who are we to listen to? The chief medical officer, the chief scientific officer and the government? Or the FA, the EFL and the Premier League? writes Sean O'Grady

Related video: How has sport been affected by coronavirus? (Reuters)

So now it’s serious. Football’s locked itself down, hung up its boots and packed it in until 3 April – at the earliest. Given that the coronavirus peak isn’t due to arrive until June, the next British football match may not, in reality, be played until the autumn, at which point the authorities will have to push back the 2020-21 season. Or something. Who knows?

There’ll be a goals drought anyway, and I’ll be deprived of enjoying some more of Leicester City’s recent impressive return to form. We’ve got two promising FA cup runs on the go – women’s and men’s, a novel double. Now suspended. I don’t even know if I'm still going on the Legends Tour With Peter Shelton OBE at the King Power Stadium in a few weeks. Mental torture.

Thinking a little less parochially, what seems to be happening is that lots of organisations, companies and individuals are voluntarily imposing their own bans and lockdowns, and exiling themselves to self-isolation. Hence the national shortages of loo roll, dried pasta and hand sanitiser. Hence too, care homes asking relatives and friends not to visit. People are not exactly panicking but they are acting on the precautionary principle. They are free to do so in a free society.

The only problem with all these unilateral lockdowns is that they run directly against the government’s official advice. The experts are perfectly clear – they think there is no need to ban mass gatherings such as football matches. They think it doesn’t matter that much, and you've more chance of getting infected in the pub or in your own living room.

Worse, in the official view, if lots of us turn into hermits for a few months we’ll do more harm than good, by making a second epidemic in the autumn more likely, and reducing the chances of the population acquiring “herd immunity” as the disease grinds its way through every family in the land. In other words, if you stay home now (and you’re perfectly healthy) you are making things worse, and you'll still get the lurgy anyway, sooner or later. The same arguments apply to schools, public transport, festivals, theatres, cinemas and all the rest.

So who are we to believe? The chief medical officer, the chief scientific officer and HM government? Or the FA, the EFL and the Premier League? Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock or critics such as Nigel Farage, Rory Stewart and Jeremy Hunt?

It’s tricky because some other countries have – at first glance – taken different, more draconian approaches with success: South Korea and Taiwan for example; and now France, Ireland, and Scotland too are going further. Are we making the same mistakes that say, Italy or China made?

I’m happy to admit that I have no idea, and it’s getting harder to know what to conclude. It’s a fascinating subject, public health, but even the academic epidemiologists who pop up on the media now also disagree about what to do, just as economists or environmentalists do all the time in their fields. Experts tend to do that.

I suppose that what the government is trying to do is “squash the sombrero” as Johnson puts it. If we delay the spike in cases into the summer months and flatten it down over a longer period, it takes the pressure off the NHS during its worst winter pressures. Warmer, drier weather would help people fight infections, and also maybe kill off more of the virus. A more gradual spread might also better build up that herd immunity that protects the whole population from the risk of coronavirus. Given that mass infection is inevitable, the logic is impeccable, but you wonder whether it is possible for the authorities to be able to calibrate the response and time of the outbreak quite so precisely as is being suggested.

We are not China, and the authorities cannot make us go to football games. What do ministers do when, as seems to be happening, more and more people ignore the official advice and prefer to follow the example of the football world and lockdown anyway? It’s great that everyone is incessantly using hand sanitiser now; but beyond that, things are turning into a bit of a free for all. It’s not an encouraging prognosis.