Omens are far from good. Here in Boris’s Britain the Government has got its act together at last and for once we are ahead of the game while the rest of the world play catch up with mass inoculations against the virus.

I speak as someone old enough - and lucky - enough to have had two jabs and can view the situation with what is an unwelcome degree of smugness, although we have much to learn about what effect the current pandemic will have on all sections of society, not least sport. Here’s the rub.

We are told everyone is looking forward to getting out to watch some sport again as paying spectators. But is this really the case?

Soundings I have taken among friends who like sport as much as I do tell me they will wait and see how we are affected by the economic situation before deciding whether to prise themselves from their armchairs and join the throng in the stadiums or even renew season tickets for football.

For example, the boxing promoter Frank Warren, himself recently recovered from a spell in hospital with COVID, and not short of a few bob tells me says he faces a dilemma over whether to renew his VIP box at the Emirates next season, for which he pays some £75,000 ($104,000/€86,000) a year.

He says it is not so much the football he enjoys (well he is an Arsenal supporter) but the social aspect of entertaining his friends, family and business contacts in a convivial climate.

The prospect of having to do so with face masks and social distancing which most "’experts" believe will have to continue even when stadiums re-open for the public makes this less appetising.

In football’s case, because of the lockdown, we have been treated to a surfeit of soccer on the box and it may be that many fans will have lost the habit of going to matches especially as the cost of doing so seems certain to escalate to recover the losses through ground closures.

Listening to the plethora of boffins who now dominate our TV screens it often seems like a convention of Cassandras.

Most, if not all, predict that COVID can never be fully eliminated, merely contained to a workable degree, and that the virus will always be with us in one form or another with new strains springing up.

If this is so sport will continue to suffer, by necessity, restrictions for years to come. As will the entertainment, tourism and hospitality industries.

Social distancing, face coverings and polite applause only in half empty stadiums, with no shouting or singing.

Though I don’t understand why, as such vocal support surely would be muffled by those face masks.

Even if the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics do go ahead, which appears increasingly unlikely, as they seem a recipe for another spike in the pandemic, even if such structures are applied.

Doubts must also remain over such events of global interest as Wimbledon where social distancing among the jam-packed crowds who throng the corridors between the outer courts would be impossible to apply.

In some ways those who play professional sport haven’t helped themselves or the situation. Footballers continue to flout legal regulations by throwing or attending parties and disregarding advice not to overdo goal celebrations by hugging and piling on top of each other.

And why has no-one banned those seemly rugby scrums? Watching a couple of Six Nations games all that huddling and heaving, not to mention shameless brutality, would have the participants arrested if happening on the pavements rather than the pitch.

And how come so many elite footballers have such beautiful coiffeurs when the majority of us can’t get simple short back and sides? But I digress.

Understandably most nations are preoccupied with the continuing battle against what Donald Trump, in one of his rare saner moments, labelled the China virus, rather than what life might be like should it ever be contained.

However there have been several studies in the United States by academic institutions as to what we might expect. None are ultra optimistic, even about ever getting a beer or a burger while we watch the action.

Yet as economist James Reade opines in Forbes Magazine: "Perhaps, though, COVID-19 is going to drive some positive change here. Why can’t we order food and drinks via our mobile phones?

"Why can’t they then either be brought to us at our seat, or can’t we go pick them up when our phones tell us they are ready? Why can’t technology manage this such that we don’t have to queue, and don’t have to miss the action?"

Of course, some culture shift is inevitable. In the UK, for whatever reason, we get up to do things - we buy our beers at the bar, for some reason table service is "continental", rather foreign.

But COVID already changed that when we went back to the pubs in the summer as the first wave dissipated. Why wouldn’t we do the same at sporting events, and music events?

Two thousand people in a 50,000 seater stadium, all socially distanced. No hugging a stranger when your team scores the winner.

The one thing that has been greatly missed is the "atmosphere" whatever we watch on the box. Welcome as COVID-safe events may be, even with injected crowd noises they don’t sound like the real thing.

We will have to see, but we must learn to live with it until late summer, and almost certainly beyond. It seems that never again can there be such a thing as as safe sport? COVID-19 quite literally has been a game-changer.