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The return of packed football stadiums could be as long as 18 months away, medical experts have warned.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, both Everton and Liverpool regularly played in front of capacity crowds at their home grounds of Goodison Park and Anfield respectively but the prospect of large gatherings of tens of thousands of people could still be a long way off unless an effective vaccine for COVID-19 is developed.

With three-quarters of the 2019/20 Premier League season already completed, football chiefs continue to debate how best to bring the campaign to a satisfactory conclusion with proposals for teams to return to action playing behind closed doors.

That scenario might have to continue for many months rather than just several weeks though, scientists have cautioned.

Speaking in The Times, Dr Zach Binney, an epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, thinks that it will not be possible for fans to attend sports events until a vaccine exists for coronavirus.

He said: “The thing that people need to understand, epidemiologically speaking, is that every person you add to a gathering adds risk,” he said. “Five people is more dangerous than two, ten is more dangerous than five, 500 is more dangerous than ten, 60,000 is very, very dangerous.

“Even if you have really low community-based transmission, it only takes a few people in that crowd of 60,000 for there to be a risk of something very significant happening.

“As a scientist, I hate to say I am ever 100% sure about anything but I am as close to 100% as I’ve ever been that we cannot return to filled-to-capacity stadia until we have a vaccine. Period.

“The best guess is about 18 months, could be a little more, could be a little less.”

Meanwhile, Professor Karol Sikora, a cancer specialist and immunologist who is conducting tests on a South Korean antibody test that could be a game-changer in the battle against the virus, agrees that a vaccine is between 12 and 18 months away but says the “logistics of immunising 68 million people is profound”.

Instead, he believes it would make sense to allow fans to return when the immunity of the population, through contracting the disease, has reached 60%.

But he reckons that figure is only between 10-15% right now.