Playing college football games didn’t spread coronavirus among athletes, study suggests
At some points in the pandemic, it wasn’t clear that there would even be a college football season. It seemed football players would have to break all the pandemic safety rules about keeping their distance from each other. Players don’t wear face coverings when they play, they don’t wash their hands before fiddling with their mouthguards or touching a shared object like the football, they shout when they are in close proximity to each other and they pile on each other when tackling.
For the study, researchers from Texas A&M University tracked nearly 1,200 SEC football players between September 26 and December 19, 2020. The players had wearable sensors that could determine what kind of close contact they had during the game, and they had PCR Covid-19 tests three times a week during the season. If any players or coaches tested positive, there were strict isolation and quarantine rules.
In total, the players had 109,762 opposing-player interactions over 64 regular season games, the study found. Out of all the players the study followed, 138 tested positive during the season; only 18 tested positive for Covid-19 within 48 hours of playing a game. That suggests regular testing and the strict isolation and quarantine rules kept the majority of players who got sick off the field.
“We thought that play was relatively safe because we knew that the SEC was implementing several different strategies to mitigate the spread of Covid-19,” Dixon, a visiting assistant professor at Texas A&M School of Public Health, said.
In addition to regular testing and quarantine and isolation protocols, there were a few other factors that may have kept the players safe.
“Remember the time in this pandemic when people would walk past each other even with masks on outside and tense up because there was this idea that they’d transmit the virus, look at a study like this and you see why this doesn’t happen,” she said.
The study does have a few limitations. It was performed before the more contagious Delta variant was in wide circulation. It was also done before vaccinations were widely available. Both factors may have impacted the number of people who caught Covid-19.
“Studies like this show that many activities that appear risky actually are on a continuum between safe and not safe,” wrote Dr. Daniel Morgan with the VA Maryland Health Care System in the commentary that accompanied the study.
“The results of this study show that following protective and mitigative strategies is very important,” Dixon said. “It also shows that we can safely play sports when we’re following such protocol.”
