Despite the COVID hysterics who warned you otherwise, a college-football game did not lead to a spike in positive cases.
Despite the COVID hysterics who warned you otherwise, a college-football game did not lead to a spike in positive cases.
W ith the college-football season now under way, familiar voices — in the media and elsewhere — have begun to sound the alarms over stadiums full of unmasked students and fans. Perhaps most memorable was this video of a jam-packed Lane Stadium in Blacksburg, Va., for Virginia Tech’s home opener against the University of North Carolina. As the clip made the rounds online, it sparked outrage and fear of an inevitable COVID outbreak.
It’s been over a month since that first game, and Virginia Tech has played two more games in Blacksburg since then. Has there been a COVID outbreak? Not so much. Mark Owczarski, associate vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech, tells National Review in an email that the data show “not only that there hasn’t been a surge within the university community, but seven day positivity rates in the Tech community have declined.”
Owczarski cites university testing data that show COVID moving quite independently of the football schedule. The day with the most positive tests (28) was September 3, the day of the home opener. Given that tests typically take a few days to provide an accurate result, those who tested positive that day must have contracted the virus elsewhere. That was also the day with one of the highest seven-day average positivity rates, at 2.3 percent. The seven-day average hovered around 2 percent from August 26 until September 9, after which it started to decline. Virginia Tech played its second home game on September 11. The positivity rate hovered around 1 percent from September 16 until September 24, then declined again to about a half a percent. The team played its third home game on September 25; the rate has increased slightly since then, and today sits at about 1 percent again.
The university has not seen any COVID outbreaks among students. Between September 28 and October 4, only 14 students tested positive out of 2,055 tests, and only five students are currently in quarantine. Virginia Tech has over 37,000 students.
You might think that this is because 95 percent of Virginia Tech students are vaccinated, in addition to the university’s other protective measures to mitigate spread. The general population around Virginia Tech has much lower vaccination rates than does the university population, with each county in the area currently around 50 percent. The surrounding area, which is less vaccinated and less cautious, could have seen an outbreak.
But according to Dr. Noelle Bissell of the Virginia Department of Health, it hasn’t either. Bissell is the director of the New River Health District (NRHD), which includes Floyd, Giles, Montgomery, and Pulaski Counties, as well as the City of Radford. Blacksburg is in Montgomery County, and the NRHD contains about 180,000 residents in total. In an email to National Review, Bissell writes, “The district as a whole peaked the week of 9/7 without seeing a significant increase from the prior week, and Montgomery County (where VT is located) peaked the week of 9/1. Our cases have continued to decrease since those peaks.”
She attached graphs to her email with the epi curves for the entire health district and for Montgomery County alone. Both show an increase in cases predating the Virginia Tech home opener, a peak on roughly the same day as the game, and a steep decline ever since.
“This is consistent with what has been seen in other college football towns,” Bissell writes. “In Ann Arbor, MI, on 9/4 (the day of their opener) the 7 day average of new cases in Washtenaw County was 81; two weeks later on 9/20 it was 80. In Travis County, TX (Univ TX) cases were down in the weeks after their opener on 9/4; in Brazos County (TX A&M) the growth rate in new cases was unchanged after theirs. Knoxville, Atlanta, Gainesville, Tallahassee and Auburn (AL) were other locations of home openers, and none saw significant increases in cases temporally associated with football game attendance.”
She concludes, “We have not seen, and we do not expect to see, surges in new cases related to outdoor gatherings.”
So, what have we learned? Virginia Tech’s home opener was yet another super-spreader that wasn’t. Get vaccinated, buy those college-football tickets, and don’t let the COVID hysterics among us scare you.