Australia’s decision to pull out of next month’s three-test tour to South Africa due to the COVID-19 pandemic is “disappointing” considering the fact that the country had put in place a number of safety measures, Cricket South Africa (CSA) said on Tuesday.
Cricket Australia’s interim chief executive Nick Hockley said in an earlier statement that travelling from Australia to South Africa posed an unacceptable level of health and safety risk to players, support staff and the community.
No dates were given on when the tour might take place.
But, CSA Director of Cricket Graeme Smith believes the Australian’s concerns are unfounded, while Chief Medical Officer Shuaib Manjra said the risk of COVID-19 cases among the touring party would have been extremely low, given the amount of work CSA had put into creating a BioSecure Environment (BSE).
“Cricket Australia based their decision on zero risks, and I think that zero risks in this world are impossible,” he said in a video statement. “We worked on probabilities, they worked on possibilities, so clearly we went as far as we could taking all the precautions, with a fair degree of certainty that there would be no positive cases within the BSE.”
