The NFL’s Covid-19 playbook ahead of the 2021 Super Bowl is explained

Under the shoulder pads of every player on the field in Tampa, Florida, during Super Bowl LV, there will be small, white, rectangular items on Sunday. These devices are proximity sensors that measure how close players come in contact others and for how long.

The units on the field, developed by Kinexon, are just a few of the more than 11,000 such devices that are attached to the belts and wristbands, or that have been tied to players and staff at the National Football League this past season. . They provided league officials with terabyte of data, which is part of the reason why Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers encounter it.

Since the inception of the Covid-19 pandemic, every professional sports league has had to devise a way to deal with the widespread transmission of this deadly disease. They have used different approaches – such as the NBA, which resumed its 2020 season in a bubble, with the last series of games and playoffs being held at Disney World in Florida.

Surprisingly, many leagues have found that the risk of player-to-player transfer on the field, track or ice is quite low, and therefore few players wear masks during matches.

The NFL approach is nonetheless one of the highlights.

By the end of the regular season, the league had managed to contain the virus against thousands of people less than ten positive cases a week. They accomplished this through a combination of mass testing, careful contact detection, isolation of suspected cases, high levels of mask wear, and social distance.

“They took a comprehensive approach,” said Davidson Hamer, a professor of global health and medicine at Boston University School of Public Health who was not involved in the league. “It seems like they’ve done all these things successfully.”

So successful that the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) last week published a case study to see how the NFL manages to investigate the season between August and November 2020. During this period, the NFL has 329 confirmed cases of Covid-19, a positive percentage below 0.1 percent. The positivity rate of the Covid-19 test for the U.S. as a whole is still about 7 percent.

The proximity trackers were certainly helpful to league officials, and the NFL also brought its huge financial resources to bear the problem, but what distinguishes the NFL is that they were able to get shopping from their players, staff members, coaches, cooks. , and coaches, all with the goal of hitting the roster every Sunday.

This commitment to a central goal can be the biggest challenge to repeat for anyone else who wants to use the NFL’s playbook.

The NFL’s Covid-19 Strategy Explains

At the start of the season, the NFL was still struggling to figure out what actually works to contain Covid-19. Rules were somewhat arbitrary and not always adhered to, and teams like the Baltimore Ravens and the Tennessee Titans suffered major Covid-19 outbreaks. As the season progressed, teams began to take the pandemic more seriously, and the NFL switched to a more aggressive set of rules to control the disease, as officials gathered more information on how the virus spreads.

NFL

Here are some of the strong players in the NFL’s tactics in its 32 teams.

Test: The NFL conducted more than 1 million tests for Covid-19, testing players daily and using a combination of rapid care tests, as well as laboratory tests that yielded results within 24 hours.

This disease surveillance enabled the league to detect infections early and initiate isolation protocols before the infected individual could spread the virus to more people.

Locate: The data from the Kinexon devices helped league officials track down the footprints of infected people and find out who else has a high probability of becoming infected, based on how close their contacts were and for how long. Researchers found that there were several cases of transmission between people with less than 15 minutes of exposure.

Conversely, the league did not find any cases of transfer on the field during matches, although players did not wear face masks. This is probably because of their movement and ventilation on the field. “We have not seen the virus cross the line of rogue,” Allen Sills, NFL chief medical officer, told the news conference Thursday.

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The league found that after implementing their intensive protocol, for 71 percent of the cases detected, no high-risk contacts were found, indicating that the procedures make it much less likely that infections would spread.

Such granular data collection was intrusive and its analysis labor-intensive, but it enabled the NFL to better target its approach.

Isolation: Infected individuals were instructed to isolate for five days and were tested during and after their isolation periods.

Masks: The NFL quickly realized that wearing masks was an important way to limit the spread of the virus. “In 100% of cases, compliance with a weak mask was part of the transmission,” said Christina Mack, lead author of the CDC report and vice president for epidemiology and clinical evidence at IQVIA, a health analysis firm. said during the press conference.

However, it was very important to get almost everyone to wear masks, but players adapted to wearing it almost always within a few weeks, even in the gym and during workouts. Players also had a bit of peer pressure. “I don’t think anyone wanted to be ‘that guy,'” Anthony Casolaro, the Washington Football Team’s medical team, told the news conference.

Along with the data collection, the NFL was able to deduce when masks were most effective. Although there was no transmission on the field, exposure risks increased as people were in contact longer. This is why the NFL’s guidance allows players to be maskless during the game, but they leave masks if they shake hands afterwards.

Reduction of exposure: The league has also taken steps to limit the opportunities for the spread of the virus. Meetings were virtual. Players and staff were told not to ride together and were spread over buses. Meals are provided in grab-and-go bags and are no longer eaten together. Indoor spaces had sharp capacity limits.

Liability: There was not only a comprehensive, centralized plan, but also people responsible for carrying it out. “It was very clear how things should be done, when things should be done, and who is going to do it,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told the press conference. . “I have never seen anything organized that can take action quickly.”

The NFL has also taken steps to punish individuals and organizations that have not complied with the rules. Both the Ravens and the Titans received fines for violating the league’s Covid-19 regulations.

The lessons we can and cannot take from the NFL

Sills said that although the NFL invested heavily in daily tests and extensive detection, such elements on their own were not enough to control Covid-19. “These were not the things that prevented the transfer, because we had all the things in place and in some cases had shipping,” he said.

The things that won the day for the league were tactics that everyone could use, such as wearing masks and avoiding prolonged close contact. “These are lessons and strategies that can be applied in organizations, regardless of their resources,” Sills said.

Tara Kirk Sell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who was not involved with the NFL, said the league’s experience does show that there are alternatives to endless isolation and boredom during the pandemic. “I think it shows us that really thoughtful approaches to Covid-19 can really enable us to do a few things,” she said.

But even basic public health measures require time, effort and money. People should also be willing to follow the rules if no one is looking at them. “We can not all have our own Covid babysitters,” Sell said. Without the shared mission and resources of an organization like the NFL, it’s much harder to build a system to contain Covid-19.

NFL officials did not specify how much money and personnel it would take to contain outbreaks among its players and staff.

At the same time, there are hints about what would have happened if the NFL had not been so strict. The recent soccer season for universities, in which more than 100 matches have been canceled and more than 6,000 infected players, could be an example. There are far more college soccer teams than NFL teams, and the pandemic was far more disruptive to college athletes, despite many schools’ best efforts to curb the spread. “They did not really have a uniform approach,” Sell said.

Meanwhile, the US as a whole has struggled with all the most basic measures to control Covid-19, with spotty and delayed tests, resistance to mask wear and often insufficient social distance – not to mention the lack of granular data it can come from of devices like proximity sensors or even tracking smartphones. Thus, cities, states, companies and schools are likely to continue to stumble under the burden of new cases of the disease.

But as millions of Americans watch the big game on Sunday, they get a glimpse of what would be possible if they teamed up, followed the same plays and began a journey to the end zone of the pandemic.

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Correction: In an earlier version of this article, the type of data collected by the NFL was stated incorrectly.