NFL’s Covid-19 playbook ahead of Super Bowl 2021, explained

Under the shoulders of every player on the field in Tampa, Fla. During Super Bowl LV on Sunday, there will be little white, rectangular gadgets. These devices are proximity sensors, measuring the proximity of players with others and for how long.

Developed by Kinexon, the field units are just a few of the more than 11,000 such devices attached to belts and bracelets, or hanging from the lanyards of players and National Football League staff during the last season. They’ve provided league officials with terabytes of data and part of why the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers are up against it.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, every professional sports league has had to find a way to deal with the widespread transmission of this deadly disease. They’ve used different approaches – like the NBA, which resumed its 2020 season in a bubble, with the final series of games and playoffs at Disney World in Florida.

Surprisingly, many leagues have found that the risk of player-to-player transmission on the court, on the court or on the ice is quite low, which is why few players wear masks during games.

The NFL’s approach, however, is one of the best moments.

Towards the end of the regular season, the league managed to contain the virus to less than 10 positive cases per week out of thousands of staff. They accomplished this through a combination of mass testing, rigorous contact tracing, isolation of suspected cases, high mask wearing, and social distancing.

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

With such success that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week released a case study of how the NFL managed to achieve this, looking at the season between August and November 2020. During this period, the NFL found 329 confirmed cases of Covid-19, a positivity rate of less than 0.1%. The Covid-19 test positivity rate for the entire United States is still around 7%.

Proximity trackers have certainly been of use to league officials, and the NFL has also provided immense financial resources to address the issue, but what sets the NFL apart is that it was able to gain buy-in from its members. players, staff, coaches, cooks. , and coaches, all with the goal of hitting the grill every Sunday.

This commitment to a central purpose can prove to be the biggest challenge to replicate for anyone attempting to use the NFL playbook.

NFL’s Covid-19 Strategy, Explained

At the start of the season, the NFL was still struggling to figure out what was actually working to contain Covid-19. The rules were somewhat arbitrary and not always followed, and teams like the Baltimore Ravens and the Tennessee Titans have suffered major outbreaks of Covid-19. As the season wore on, teams started to take the pandemic more seriously and the NFL moved on to a more aggressive set of rules to control the disease as officials gathered more information on how the virus was spreading.

NFL

Here are some of the powerful players from the NFL’s tactical lineup across its 32 teams.

Trial: The NFL has performed over a million tests for Covid-19, testing players daily and using a combination of rapid point-of-care tests as well as lab tests that yielded results within 24 hours.

This disease surveillance allowed the league to quickly detect infections and begin isolation protocols before the infected person could spread the virus to more people.

Trace: Data from Kinexon devices helped league officials track who was infected and find out who else had a high probability of being infected based on how close and for how long their contacts were. The researchers found that there were several cases of transmission between people with less than 15 minutes of exposure.

Conversely, the league found no cases of transmission on the pitch during games, even though the players were not wearing face masks. This is probably due to their available movement and ventilation in the field. “We haven’t seen the virus cross the line of scrimmage,” Allen Sills, the NFL chief medical officer, said at Thursday’s press conference.

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The league found that after implementing its intensive protocol, it found no high-risk contacts in 71% of the cases traced, showing that the procedures made the spread of infections much less likely.

Such granular data collection was invasive and labor-intensive to analyze, but it allowed the NFL to better target its approach.

Isolation: Infected people had to self-isolate for five days and were tested during and after their periods of isolation.

Mask: The NFL quickly saw that wearing masks was an important way to limit the spread of the virus. “In 100% of cases, poor mask adherence was part of the transmission,” said Christina Mack, lead author of the CDC report and vice president for epidemiology and clinical evidence at IQVIA, an analytical company. health data, during the press conference.

However, getting just about everyone to wear masks at all times was a tall order, but players adapted within weeks to wearing them almost anytime, even in the gym and during training. The players also had a bit of peer pressure. “I don’t think anybody wanted to be ‘that guy’,” Anthony Casolaro, Washington Football Team doctor, said at the press conference.

Coupled with data collection, the NFL was able to deduce when the masks were most effective. Although there was no transmission in the field, the risk of exposure increased the more people came into contact. This is why the NFL advice allows players to be maskless during the game, but makes them mask themselves when they shake hands afterwards.

Reduce exposure: The league has also taken measures to limit the possibilities of the virus spreading. The meetings were virtual. Players and staff were instructed not to carpool and were allocated to the buses. Meals were provided in take-out bags and were no longer eaten together. The interior spaces had clear capacity limits.

Responsibility: There was not only a comprehensive and centralized plan, but people were appointed responsible for its execution. “It was very clear how to get things done, when to get things done and who was going to do them,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said at the press conference. . . “I have never seen anything so organized, which is able to act quickly.”

The NFL has also taken action to punish individuals and organizations who violate the rules. The Ravens and Titans have both been fined for violating the league’s Covid-19 regulations.

Lessons we can and can’t learn from the NFL

Sills said while the NFL invests heavily in daily testing and in-depth tracing, these elements alone were not enough to control Covid-19. “It’s not the things that prevented transmission because we had all of those things in place and transmission in some cases,” he said.

The things that won the day for the league were tactics anyone can use, like 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 in the NFL, said the league’s experience shows 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 allow us to do some things,” she said.

But even basic public health measures take time, effort and money. People should also be prepared to follow the rules when no one is watching. “We can’t all have our own Covid babysitters,” Sell said. Without the mission and shared resources of an organization like the NFL, it is much more difficult to create a system to contain Covid-19.

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

At the same time, there are clues as to what might have happened if the NFL hadn’t been so tough. The last season of college football, which saw more than 100 games canceled and more than 6,000 players infected, could be one example. There are many more college football teams than there are NFL teams, and the pandemic has been much more disruptive to college athletes, despite the best efforts of many schools to contain the spread. “They didn’t really have a unified approach,” Sell said.

Meanwhile, the United States as a whole has been grappling with all of the most basic measures to control Covid-19, with patchy and delayed testing, resistance to wearing masks, and often inadequate social distancing – not to mention the lack of granular data that could come from gadgets like proximity sensors or even smartphone tracking. Thus, cities, states, businesses and schools will likely continue to stumble under the burden of new cases of illness.

But as millions of Americans tune in to watch Sunday’s big game, they’ll get a glimpse of what’s possible if they were to team up, follow the same games, and hit the pandemic end zone. .

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Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the type of data the NFL collects.