Not surprising, but it's good to see the evidence bearing this out.
WSJ article (subscription)
WSJ article (subscription)
Quote:
The NFL season has been sacked by bursts of Covid-19 cases over the last several weeks. Games have been postponed. Teams have been shut down. Safety protocols have been overhauled.
Yet there's a sliver of hope for footballand many other sportsin this rash of cases. The virus doesn't appear to have spread from team to team on the field. That echoes the experience of other professional sports that have played during the pandemic without transmitting the virus during competition.
It's everything else that's the problem. Traveling and sharing a locker room are more suspect than humongous people tackling one another. And one ritual may be scarier than everything else: having dinner together.
Breaking breadas a team or in small gatheringsplayed a starring role in team outbreaks at Notre Dame and on both the Tennessee Titans and New England Patriots, for example. But those teams' subsequent football games didn't create additional problems: their opponents tested negative.
Most teams haven't disclosed how they think Covid outbreaks have begun, but the leagues have flagged where they think problems lie by how they change their protocols. The NFL is focusing more on what happens off the field than on. Sitting down to a meal with a team member who subsequently tests positive for coronavirus now may get the guest a mandatory invitation to a five-day isolation periodwith no option to escape by registering negative tests.
"We still see no evidence of on-field transmission from football-related activities," Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL's chief medical officer, said recently.
Quote:
He explained that close contact between two masked people outdoors probably posed less risk of transmission than two people in a car together, unmasked, for just a few minutes. Other examples of concerns were people sharing living quarters or eating meals together. Playing football against someoneor practicing togetherwasn't on the list of concerns he rattled off.
The bigger problems come when teams are doing anything other than playing football. That's when they're in cities where virus rates are increasing. It's also when they're engaging in activities that could lead to more viral spread, with the two best players on the Patriots as the unfortunate example of this.
Days after Patriots quarterback Cam Newton tested positive earlier this month, cornerback Stephon Gilmore, the NFL's reigning defensive player of the year, registered a positive test as well. But the team doesn't believe the virus was spread inside the facility, a person familiar with the matter said. It turned out Newton and Gilmore had dinner together on the same day Newton took the test that would later come back positive.
Quote:
Major League Baseball reached a similar conclusion earlier in the year, for a sport played with far less contact between players. Their lucky finding came after the infected Miami Marlins played the Philadelphia Phillies, who repeatedly tested negative for the virus after the teams played.
At least one sport may not be able to embrace this reality: hockey. The NHL successfully made it through its season by sealing players away from the outside world, with regular testing and mandatory preventive measures. Those measures may well have prevented the kind of on-ice transmission described in an alarming recent study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Florida health officials recounted a June recreational hockey game in Tampa Bay during which a presymptomatic but infectious player appeared to have transmitted coronavirus to eight out of 10 teammates, five out of 11 players from the opposing team, and one rink staff member.
The game was clearly the problem. The amateur league players, unlike their professional counterparts, didn't spend time with each other in the week before the game. The 15 people infected experienced the signs and symptoms of Covid within five days of the game; 13 had positive test results and two weren't tested.
"The ice rink provides a venue that is likely well suited to Covid-19 transmission as an indoor environment where deep breathing occurs, and persons are in close proximity to one another," the authors wrote. "The high proportion of infections that occurred in this outbreak provides evidence for SARS-CoV-2 transmission during an indoor sporting activity where intense physical activity is occurring."
