It is believed some sports may be given the green light to return when officials begin to ease the COVID-19 lockdown.

The National Public Health Emergency Team is expected to make its recommendations for the next phase of restrictions tomorrow.

The advice will then be debated at Cabinet before a formal announcement is made.

Yesterday it emerged that officials are considering a phased lifting of the lockdown over the coming months and, according to The Irish Times, people may soon be able to play sports like tennis and golf.

DCU Professor Anthony Staines

On Breakfast Briefing with Andrea Gilligan this morning, DCU Professor Anthony Staines said the sports themselves do not pose the greatest difficulty.

“Well the challenge with all of those is not the golf course itself – because you can remain socially distant – or the tennis match, it is the changing rooms and the clubhouse,” he said.

“That is the tricky bit. The major sports have been doing a lot of work on questions like how many people do you need to run a race?

You need the jockeys obviously, but you need medics, you need safety staff, you need course staff, you need people to mind the horse and so on. How many people do you need to run a football match? Those questions are being considered. Given the space involved it may be possible to run some sporting events behind closed doors.

“The issues around sports for the general public is not so much the sport itself, it is the social mixing that happen around it.”

Restrictions

Professor Staines said officials are looking at three main issues while making their decision on the lockdown.

“We have got to really have three things in place to ease the restrictions

“One is, the number of cases has got be falling steadily and that is not happening at the moment,” he said. “It is not going up but it is not going down.

“The number of deaths is staying around the same. It wiggles up and down but fortunately it has not got to the levels we were really scared might happen.

“The number of people in ICU beds is very positive. There is a relatively small proportion of the total ICU beds occupied by people with COVID-19.”

Transmission

He said it is “reasonable” to wait for the number of new cases to hit the very low hundreds before restrictions can be lifted.

He said the country’s capacity for analysing tests has gone up a lot; however, our capacity for “intensive contact tracing” is not advanced enough to confidently lift restrictions.

“That is how you break transmission,” he said. “That is how you stop the virus spreading but at the moment we have too many cases to do that as thoroughly and effectively as we need to.”

The DCU professor said the country is essentially facing two separate epidemics.

“The epidemic in the general population has really begun to decline but there is still a very serious outbreak in nursing homes and care homes which, I think, is still not under control,” he said.

“In that circumstance it would be very risky to make any substantial changes.”

The Taoiseach is expected to make a formal announcement on the next phase of the restrictions sometime tomorrow afternoon.