New study finds link between fans at NFL games, Dolphins included, and COVID-19 spread
The first of November, 2020, was a celebratory day for the Miami Dolphins franchise.
Tua Tagovailoa made his much-anticipated first NFL start, and the Dolphins crushed the Rams 28-17.
The crowd on hand made plenty of noise, even though there were just 12,397 of them. Hard Rock Stadium was at one-fifth capacity, but that was by design.
The Dolphins took every precaution short of banning fans altogether to prevent the spread of COVID-19 — social distancing, high-end cleaning, mobile touchless entry, cashless concessions, no tailgating and mandatory mask wearing.
And yet 14 days later, Miami-Dade health officials recorded a spike in positive coronavirus tests (2,385). Was the Dolphins game partially to blame? It was just one data point, of course, but part of what researchers say was a broader trend throughout the National Football League in 2020.
A new multiuniversity study, which included contributors from University of Miami, claims to have found a link between fan attendance at NFL games — particularly in stadiums with huge crowds — and episodic spikes in the count of COVID-19 cases/rates in nearby communities.
Their research has been submitted to Lancet, a scientific journal, for peer review and was made public this week.
Alex Piquero, the chair of UM’s sociology department and one of the study’s authors, explained how he and his colleagues found a link between games with large crowds and spikes in infections:
“We compared COVID-19 cases data alongside game attendance data in order to examine if there was any evidence of increases in COVID-19 subsequent to fan attended games at seven, 14, and 21 days thereafter — which is the time when the virus takes hold,” Piquero told the Miami Herald. “For the league comparisons, we did not find much evidence after seven days, which is not entirely surprising given COVID-19’s incubation period. But we did detect significant spikes at 14 and 21 days in communities that had fans at games compared to those that did not have fans at those games.”
When reached for comment, a spokesman for the Miami Dolphins referred the Herald to National Football League, which in a statement disputed the report’s findings.
The league said NFL games with fans did not have an impact on overall COVID cases at the local level — pointing to research done by MIT and a peer-reviewed published study by Georgia Tech and Harvard.
“With the expert guidance of local, state and federal public health officials, including the CDC, we hosted fans safely and responsibly during the 2020 NFL season,” the NFL wrote. “Those same experts and an independent group of researchers at MIT have told us our approach worked: there were no local clusters of COVID cases traced to our games. We are proud of that outcome and will apply the same principled effort — putting health and safety first for all involved — going forward into the 2021 season.”
While his group’s research found Miami-Dade and the surrounding counties did experience a greater spike in COVID-19 case rates post-Dolphins games than those cities that did not allow fans, Piquero said the team’s decision to limit capacity certainly helped.
There were far more pronounced surges in towns that allowed bigger crowds, the study found.
“When stadiums had fewer than 5,000 fans, we did not detect elevated COVID case numbers like we did with teams that permitted more than 20,000 fans,” Piquero said.
While this research was gathered during a time of dangerously high level of spread with no available vaccines, the study has real-time applications:
The Texas Rangers have no restrictions on attendance this season, and are averaging nearly 25,000 fans per home game, including a sell-out crowd of 32,238 in their opener.
“Right now, the Marlins, Panthers, and Heat are all permitting some limited fans, with extensive protocols, in attendance,” Piquero said. “I think this slowly introducing fans into games with continued mask wearing, social distancing, and related protocols in place is a sensible strategy and I applaud the efforts made by those organizations. However, opening up to capacity right now, as the Texas Rangers baseball club did this week, or in the foreseeable future until more people have been vaccinated and the variants reined in —which is a problem right now in South Florida — is not a sensible strategy.”
This story was originally published April 8, 2021 at 11:45 AM.
