Counting the costs of long Covid: vaccine hesitancy, productivity and football 

Government pandemic policy has changed tack. If a horse can be led to water but cannot be made to drink, much less can any demographic offered a vaccine be compelled or cajoled or coaxed to inject it. Given a choice between keeping restrictions in place without end date or getting rid of them altogether, the Government’s vaccine policy is now, in effect, to declare victory and go home. Herd immunity is now the new objective. 

It was easy to observe how lockdowns put the economy into slow motion. It is harder to look ahead to whether pandemic permissiveness will bring another drag in its wake. Economists from the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) at Heinrich Heine University have studied pre- and post-lockdown productivity in a high-performance industry, namely football. From this research they find that Covid infections reduce long run productivity by five per cent.

The study extrapolates from a specialist data set.

In Germany and Italy, professional competitive matches resumed by June 2020. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, 257 out of 1,406 players in their country’s top league were infected. Sports analytics show how Covid affected player performance.  

During the six months post-infection, the likelihood of a player being fielded drops by over five per cent and his on-pitch playing time by six minutes. Passing accuracy declines by five per cent, and deteriorates the longer a player has been on the pitch. What makes these indicators even more ominous is that it seems they stabilise after six months. In other words, players never claw back their handicap.

Age at time of infection makes a material difference. Teasing out the correspondence between age and underperformance, the effect of only a few years in age is disproportionate — in fact, shocking. A player contracting Covid in his thirties suffers twice the rate of performance drop of a player in his twenties. 

The effects of Covid on players’ physical resilience, as the study points out, endure. It contains further graphs which show that affected players need more days to recover from injury. (To view them, e.g. frequency of touches and repercussions on team performance, see The Long Shadow of an Infection: Covid-19 and Performance at Work.)

Should we care about the physical condition of some of Europe’s fittest, highest paid, and most pampered professionals? 

The answer is: yes. Indeed, these findings matter far beyond sports arenas. 

Vaccine hesitancy is known to pervade younger people in particular. Given the low incidence of Covid fatalities among younger demographics, some observers consider this approach is only rational. Why bother to shield against an illness that is no worse than the flu? Lockdown sceptics have often invoked the hidden, long-term harm that came from obliging people to curtail their movements. But the shoe is now on the other foot. With lockdowns now lifted and Covid given free rein, hard facts of what infections entail for even the fittest segments of society must not be ignored. If top athletes cannot salvage their pre-infection health, what prospects beckon for anyone outside their charmed circle?

All graphs courtesy Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE)

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