Jackson Jambalaya

The Wall Street Journal reported professional athletes did not infect each other with Covid-19 while participating in  outdoor sports such as baseball.  Oddly enough, the biggest threat to players came not from contact on the field but rather from simple activities such as eating together.  The newspaper reviewed the effectiveness of Covid-19 protocols in professional sports leagues recently and gleaned a few lessons.  The Journal reported:  

America woke on the morning of March 12 to a strange new world without sports. The NBA season had been suspended the night before. By the end of the day, March Madness would be canceled. Every other league and the Tokyo Olympics soon followed. People had become risks. Crowds had become threats. Sports vanished.

Exactly seven months later, on the morning of Oct. 12, something was happening that few predicted. LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers were celebrating a National Basketball Association title. Major League Baseball’s season was down to four teams battling for spots in the World Series. National Football League and college football games were being played with some fans in stadiums.

Some leagues bubbled. Other leagues bumbled. The bubblers cocooned themselves in public-health paradises with ample testing, best practices and strict enforcement. The bumblers continued in the real world, survived Covid-19 outbreaks and plowed ahead despite mistakes that nearly toppled them....

The leagues had both the resources and incentives to get back to work, and sports was months ahead of other industries that depend on gathering a lot of people in one place. Its successes and its failures generated a trove of data for the rest of the U.S.

The pandemic seasons taught America that learning to live with coronavirus is about psychology and economics as much as it’s about science. As cases surge around the country again, the lessons from sports include:

• Testing is crucial. Professional leagues were unanimous in deciding that more testing was better, and daily testing was best.

• Act like you are in a bubble. Demanding collective participation in safety plans is what made the bubbles work.

• Pandemic fatigue is real. People will ignore rules if they see a compelling reason—whether it’s weddings or winning the World Series.

• The biggest risks are not what you expect. Sports initially feared on-field transmission, but the real threats were off the field.

• The financial outlook is bleak. The economic consequences of the pandemic will outlast the virus.

“What we’ve all learned is that a lot of things are doable in a pandemic if you take the virus seriously,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, about the way professional sports handled their return to work. “Every league that has pulled this off has taken a very deliberate, very aggressive approach.”...

The number of virus transmissions identified between thousands of people once those bubbles were firmly established: zero....

The professional leagues all placed bets on the same big idea: the more testing, the better.

Tests weren’t just plentiful in the bubble environments. They were required. In the NBA’s bubble, even though players were sequestered from the outside world for months, they subjected themselves to nasal swabs every single day....

The non-bubbled leagues tested less often at first, but soon learned that infrequent testing was insufficient.

An outbreak of positive tests for the Miami Marlins exposed how the league’s plans for playing almost every day but testing every other day, then waiting for results, wasn’t going to work. Baseball moved to daily testing.

A similar outbreak chastened the NFL. Football initially tested every day but game day. The league added tests on Sundays after it missed a crucial opportunity to intercept an outbreak on the Tennessee Titans.

The lesson for everyone else isn’t necessarily to pursue daily testing for everybody at all costs—though that is the ideal frequency for organizations that want to contain an outbreak. It is that no professional leagues that could afford such plentiful testing opted for less of it.

The transmission rates between opposing players in outdoor sports such as football, soccer and baseball appear to be low. There hasn’t been a single documented case of infection linked to professional sports being played outdoors.

In late October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report on the Marlins outbreak and its implications for the Philadelphia Phillies, the team they played while infectious.

“Throughout five professional baseball games, asymptomatic, unknowingly infected players and coaches spent more than a cumulative 11 hours on the field,” said the report, whose authors included doctors who guided MLB’s return to play. “No opposing team players or coaches or umpires became ill during the outbreak. Interactions outside of on-field play were likely the source of spread.”

That is why football teams find themselves worrying about another situation that is core to many workplaces: meals.

“Not all contacts are created equal,” said Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, who hasn’t seen evidence of on-field transmission.

Sharing a meal indoors, which means people are unmasked and often open-mouthed, was the reason Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly said doctors gave him for why 25 players suddenly tested positive in September. The team had skirted its own rules and held a large pregame meal together before playing the University of South Florida.

It was a reminder of an important lesson scientists have learned in the pandemic: Air is more dangerous than surfaces.

A hockey rink in Florida. A cycling studio in Canada. A dance-fitness class in South Korea. All were places where people had prolonged contact exercising indoors. In settings with strangers breathing, panting and emitting microscopic respiratory droplets on each other, 6 feet might as well be 6 inches.... Rest of article.