How Covid spread among fans during Euro 2020

During the last 3 years, the epidemiological outcome of important public events in which thousands of people gather has been difficult to interpret, reinforcing the belief that, in the end, these events did not really influence the spread of Sars-cov-2 . A new study has now been published which definitively clarifies the issue, demonstrating how this impact is strongly dependent on the starting epidemiological situation of the countries affected by this type of event. Particularly, the impact of the 2020 European Football Championship on the incidence of the pandemic was studiedwhich was known to be very different between participating countries.

The new research work involved the Max Planck institute for dynamics and self-organization in Göttingen, the Max Planck institute for physics in Munich, as well as the universities of Bonn and Göttingen and the Punch4Nfdi consortium in the national research data infrastructure. For what we know about how airborne viruses spread, an increase in cases of infection should be observed during international football tournaments. This is because many people watch matches in groups, whether it’s in a private living room, a pub or other public place; it is expected that on these occasions the coronavirus can spread easily.

In fact, it has been proven that the 2020 European Football Championship, held in the summer of 2021, led to numerous infections. However, the size of the effect varies considerably from country to country. The researchers studied data from twelve of the participating countries to assess how the incidence of infection developed during and after the European championship in those countries. intelligently, they focused on a separate analysis by genderso as to distinguish the epidemiological contribution of the European Championship from that of other factors, considering that more men than women watch football matches and aggregate on these occasions.

This different typhoid behavior is also reflected in different infection rates between the sexes. Using this element, the researchers estimated how many excess infections were due to people watching matches together, realizing that they depended on the preconditions at the start of the tournament. This difference is well illustrated by comparing for example the Czech Republic and England: the Czech Republic has played five matches in the last European football championships. However, despite the great typhoid fever in that country, there were only about 460 additional infections per million inhabitants. Instead, the European championship has had a much greater effect in England, with around 11,000 people per million population having been infected with the coronavirus. This is not explained by the higher number of games, as the England team played seven games until the final, but rather depends on the completely different starting epidemiological situation: in the Czech Republic, at the start of the European Championship, there had been only a few infections, while in England the number of cases was already high.

Even the reproduction rate, the famous Rt, was already relatively high in England; for this reason, in the end the cases per million of excess infections estimated to have occurred in England as a result of the football championships were around 24 times higher than in the Czech Republic. In other words, since in this type of tournament the fans tend to aggregate forming bubbles of equal nationality, the isolation between the supporters of the various nations has meant a different evolution for these groups of people, depending on the level of infected initially present which has conditioned the subsequent dynamics. Contagions have occurred less in stadiums than in private gatherings indoors, for example in pubs and homes. And, of course, the infections didn’t stop on matchdays, because every infected person started a chain of infection, through which, according to estimates, an average of four more people were infected for every virus carrier during the matchday. study period covering until the end of July 2021.

Considering all twelve countries studied, the estimates showed a total of approximately 840,000 additional infections caused by the tournament. For the world, data similar to that of the Europeans could not be obtained, because the infection data for many countries was no longer available with the necessary details. The published results indicate at this point that the decision about the development of events that require strong aggregation, especially in closed places, can be taken on the basis of the pre-existing level of viral circulation: in the presence of Rt and relatively low number of cases, the risk is limited, but phases of epidemiological recovery should lead to the postponement of large aggregations, especially when it is expected that these will occur repeatedly and over a rather extended period, as is the case with the most important international sporting events.

In addition to this interesting result, those who, without basis or with artificial analyses, going against what we know about the transmission mechanisms of the virus, claim to have demonstrated the absence of epidemiological consequences following the major football events that occurred during the pandemic, are naturally denied; the virus, as always, makes the virus, and doesn’t give in to the ideas of those who pretend to ignore the simple mechanism on the basis of which it spreads.