What have 2,000 Scottish football fans in common?

[Arneb]

They all travelled to Wembley and brought home a totally novel and unknown virus, which nobody ever, really, could possibly have foreseen.

No Respect. UEFA.

[Мастер]

Our population here is roughly comparable to Scotland's.

We currently have 127 cases in hospital, and 170 cases otherwise in isolation.

The other day there was the person picked up in a boat, coming in illegally from Indonesian waters, who tested positive.

[Lianachan]

Not really. “Only” about 400 of them were in Wembley and about 1300 travelled to London. If you scrape the surface of this story, it’s revealed to be standard issue BBC anti-SNP (and, by extension, independence) spin.

[Arneb]

Of course, I could have limked to the RT version of the story, which I bet is more anti-British. I choose the BBC report because it was the first mainstream medium I could find in the Google list. I read about it on faz.net, but that's in German.

The fact that the infected fans are Scottish is completely irrelevant to me. It's not news you can't do hygiene concepts and social distancing with a drunk crowd in a festive mood. Especially after a long, hard Corona winter. It is about the ruthless greed of UEFA and the reckless neglect of public safety by the British government that is the point here.

[Richard A]

I agree. The Scottish Government was actually responsible, urging people NOT to go to Wembley. But short of putting checkpoints at Gretna, Carter Bar and Berwick and police on the train at Dumfries and Dunbar and turning back and fining anyone found with a football shirt or banner (and we can all imagine the headlines had they done that), what more could they do? The UK Government, though, could have done a lot better.

The Hungarians, though, were even worse, although even they didn't reach the blatancy of Russia and Azerbaijan: anyone who's been in the UK, keep out - unless you're coming to watch a match in which your country is playing. Happily that has little relevance at this stage, but it did in the Group stages. As Arneb says, both UEFA and national governments have a lot to answer for.