Football Season Renews Concerns About Spread of COVID-19

As the end of the Labor Day holiday traditionally signals the beginning of fall and football season, facility managers maintaining sports stadiums for both professional and college football are concerned with keeping their arenas safe for sports fans.

A study published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open offers good news. U.S. counties that hosted professional and college football games with limited in-person attendance during the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t see a substantial increase in COVID-19 cases, Infection Control Today reports.

Researchers with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston compared COVID-19 rates in counties that hosted 528 football games (101 NFL and 427 NCAA) to a matched control group of 361 counties similar in size and COVID-19 restrictions that did not host a game on the corresponding day. For NFL games, attendance ranged from 6,000 to 13,797, with a median of 9,949. NCAA attendance wasn’t available.

On game day, the median daily new COVID-19 cases in counties that hosted football games was 26.14 cases per 100,000 residents compared with 24.11 cases per 100,000 residents for counties in the control group. The change in number of cases within 14 days after game day ranged from -5.17 to 4.72 cases per 100,000 residents, with a mean of 1.21.

“We surmise that the NFL and NCAA policies regarding limited in-person attendance, mask use, and social and physical distancing measures in stadiums was not associated with substantially higher community spread of COVID-19,” the study authors wrote. “Additionally, an important number of NFL and NCAA football stadiums are outdoors or have a retractable roof, which could have had an impact on mitigating spread.”

In a commentary to the study, Dr. Michael A. Rubin, of the Salt Lake City Health Care System and the University of Utah School of Medicine said studies like this one are necessary to provide decision-makers with the information they need to design and enact policies for community safety.  “More like it are needed as the United States and other countries confront the mounting political and societal pressure of regaining a sense of normalcy that comes with returning our large and beloved sports arenas to full—and full-throated—capacity,” Rubin said.