England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) chief Tom Harrison has made it pretty clear on Thursday that there will be no strict bio-bubble protocols during the upcoming England-India five-match Test series slated to kick off on 4th August. Despite multiple COVID-19 cases being reported across both teams in the lead up to the Test series, Harrison is of the opinion that the players and the stakeholders need to start living with COVID-19.
Indian wicket-keeper batsman Rishabh Pant had tested positive for COVID-19 around a week ago and is currently under home isolation at a relative’s place. Meanwhile, another support staff also tested positive and has been put under quarantine. The cases of COVID-19 in the UK are on the rise yet again with more than 42,000 cases being reported on Wednesday.
"We're in a different scenario to 12 months ago or even six months ago really with respect to how we cope with Covid. We're really trying to learn how we live with it and create safe environments for people as opposed to bio-secure environments," Harrison was quoted as saying by Cricbuzz.
"There's a huge difference between the two. Players are just fed up with biosecurity and bubbles and that language we have become so used to using. It's had such a detrimental impact on mental health for players, time away from families. We are just not able to operate that kind of environment going forward.
"We have to learn to cope with Covid. We're going to be living with it now for the foreseeable future so mitigation is the word as opposed to prevention. We think we've built in enough protocols now just to try and mitigate the impact of frankly inevitable infections,” Harrison added.
Meanwhile, he also added that it is very important to make sure that the whole squad doesn’t need to get replaced which happened during the ODI series against Pakistan. ECB was forced to name a totally different team against Pakistan after three players and four support staff that were part of the team against Sri Lanka tested positive for COVID-19.
"I think that is where we are trying to ensure that we don't have instances where entire squads are taken out of circulation because of one or two local infections.
"So we're working very hard to make sure those protocols are in place for the remainder of the season. We've communicated these protocols to the various camps and various teams and also the international and county environment," said Harrison.