Liverpool City mayor calls for enquiry into staging of Liverpool v Atletico

The mayor of the Liverpool City Region, Steve Rotheram, has told SNTV it's "really worrying" that a new study has "linked 41 additional coronavirus deaths" to the Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid UEFA Champions League match which took place at Anfield on March 11th.

Both Liverpool's match and the 2020 Cheltenham Festival "caused increased suffering and death", according to the scientist in charge of the UK's largest Covid-19 tracking project, Professor Tim Spector of King's College.

While the UK's The Sunday Times newspaper reported that Edge Health, which analyses data for Britain's National Health Service, estimated the match was "linked to 41 additional deaths" at nearby hospitals between 25 and 35 days later, compared with similar hospital trusts that were used as a control.

Three-thousand Atletico fans attended the second leg of their club's round of 16 tie with then holders Liverpool at Anfield, despite the Spanish government ordering major sporting events to go behind closed doors the day before and Madrid being the country's coronavirus epicentre.

Atletico won the game 3-2 after extra time to knock out the defending champions 4-2 on aggregate and reach the quarter-finals, which have yet to take place.

Rotheram, who attended the match and is a Liverpool fan, is in favour of the English Premier League's "Project Restart" procedure as long as safety is paramount.

But he feels Boris Johnson's UK government have created "chaos" with "mixed messaging" over lockdown rules, exemplified with the revelation on Friday that his Chief Advisor, Dominic Cummings, travelled 260 miles from London to Durham in England's north-east at the height of the lockdown in March.

Cummings, who later contracted Covid-19 alongside his wife, claimed this was to ensure childcare arrangements, something that contravened government advice at the time.