Mass Outdoor Events and the Spread of an Airborne Virus: English Football and COVID-19

Abstract

Mass attendance events are a mainstay of economic and social activity. Such events have public health consequences, facilitating the spreading of disease, with attendant economic consequences. There is uncertainty over the impact such events can have on the spread of disease. We investigate the impact of regular mass outdoor meetings on the spread of a virus by considering football matches in England in February and March 2020 and the spread of Covid-19 into April 2020. There were 340 league and cup football matches with a combined attendance of 1.625m people in March, taking place over 188 of 313 local areas. We look at the occurrence and attendance at matches, and how full the stadia were, and how these variables are related to the spread of Covid-19 in April. We evaluate Covid-19 cases, deaths and excess deaths, all as rates of 100,000 people in an area. We find evidence that mass outdoor events were consistent with more cases and deaths, even after controlling for measurable characteristics of local areas. We find that a football match is consistent with around six additional Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people, two additional Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 people, and three additional excess deaths per 100,000 people. This effect is slightly stronger for the areas of away teams in March, and slightly weaker for matches in February. These results suggest caution in returning to unrestricted spectator attendance at matches. We caveat our analysis though by noting that stadium access and egress routes can be adapted such that some of the opportunities for the spread of an airborne virus could be mitigated. We recommend that the relevant authorities conduct pilot events before determining to what extent fans can return to mass outdoor events.

Eliminating Supportive Crowds Reduces Referee Bias

“…Not only that, but there is evidence that the transmission of influenza can be significantly increased by the public gatherings surrounding major sports events (Stoecker et al, 2016;Cardazzi et al, 2020). There is also preliminary evidence that professional sports can explain some of the regional variation in Covid-19 deaths in the UK and the US during the early outbreak (Ahammer et al, 2020;Olczak et al, 2020). Several studies, summarised in what follows and including one by ourselves (Bryson et al, 2020), have studied the effects of playing football in empty stadiums since the Spring 2020 shutdown of the professional game.…”

What Can We Learn About Economics from Sport during COVID-19?

“…Policy makers need more evidence on if, when and how it is safe to open sports stadiums as Covid-19 rages. While the results in Olczak et al (2020) suggest caution in re-opening outdoor stadiums, they were based on fan behaviour pre-Covid-19, without the subsequent adoption of social distancing, the wearing of face coverings, and the redesign of public spaces to remove potential pressure points where people may congregate. The results also come from an early stage in the spread of the virus, which may help to explain the different results found by a study of the mass outdoor gatherings during the summer Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests, which found no growth in Covid-19 cases or deaths in the weeks following these substantial relaxations of outdoor social distancing (Dave et al, 2020).…”

“…Using a similar empirical design, another study has looked at the impact of English football matches taking place with crowds as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold (Olczak et al, 2020).…”

“…Summary of regression results of football match activity on mortality in the first half of 2020 in England (Olczak et al, 2020) Notes: Each column of plots relates to a measure of mortality (Covid-19 cases, Covid-19 deaths, and excess deaths), the top row is without any control variables, and the bottom row adds control variables. Solid dots are regression coefficients on the footballing measure, and circles are the upper and lower confidence intervals (90% significance level).…”

The tortoise and the hare: The race between vaccine rollout and new COVID variants

“…• A recent survey concludes that a majority of papers find significant effects of school closure on the spread of the virus (Walsh et al, 2020). School closure is found to be particularly effective by Liu et al (2020) and Olczak et al (2020). Chernozhukov et al (2020) argue the effect is uncertain, whilst Spiegel and Tookes (2020) find no effect.…”