The NFL’s massive COVID-19 experiment ends on Sunday with the unlikely performance of a timely Super Bowl, ending a season with no canceled games.
Why it matters: The season suggests that with the right resources, security measures, and cooperation – all of which were missing from the overall US response – life can go on through the pandemic without uncontrolled spread of the virus.
The big picture: The NFL decided early on that its thousands of players, coaches and other staff should not be living in a “bubble” as other sports leagues had done.
- Instead, The competition scaled up the basics of public health of social distance, testing, contact tracking and isolation for all 32 teams. To avoid spreading, officials were willing to postpone games or bank players.
Jeff Miller, The NFL’s Executive Vice President for Communications, Public Affairs and Policy told Axios, “The approach we took was to realize that there was an expectation that individuals would get COVID – and what can we do to prevent it? spreads to our facilities. ”
- “Our protocols were based on that premise – that life in our 32 communities during a pandemic was a risk, but we wanted to make sure we could best prevent“ virus spread ”.
Between the lines: Some of the NFL’s findings were published by the CDC, including what the league found out about the transmission of the virus.
- The main changes the league had to make over time concerned “our evolution from what was a risky contact,” Miller said.
The competition found out that high-risk contacts with an infected person were not limited to interactions lasting 15 minutes within a radius of 1.8 meters. The definition instead became more complex, taking into account time, distance, ventilation and wearing a mask.
- “Those four factors all interacted, which in our experience was much more complicated than six feet and 15 minutes,” Miller said.
It comes down to: “We’ve never seen the virus spread across the line of scrimmage,” Miller said – even when players who later tested positive entered the game.
- The competition was able to confirm this by genetic sequencing.
Go deeper: Super Bowl example