September 8, 2020

expert reaction to study looking at football matches and spread of COVID-19

A study, published in COVID Economics, looked at outdoor football matches and the spread of COVID-19.

Dr Mike Tildesley, Associate Professor, University of Warwick, said:

“My concern with this study is that not all factors have been accounted for. They claim to account for other ‘obvious’ factors such as population density, ethnicity, etc but they don’t account for everything (e.g. connectivity with the rest of the country through transportation) and so there could be other reasons why this association is seen. Correlation does not mean causation and with certain data sets and statistics you can see correlations between almost everything. I do not think this study provides good evidence that professional football matches contributed to higher Covid-19 cases and deaths in the surrounding areas.”

Dr Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton, said:

“We know that mass gatherings do pose certain risks in terms of transmission of COVID-19. However, this paper does not offer anything other than a correlation between football matches taking place in March and an increase in cases in April. They have not actually linked cases or outbreaks to football matches and there is no mention of contact tracing or outbreaks that have been obviously linked back to football attendance. One of the most basic rules of epidemiology is ‘correlation does not equal causation’, but that is essentially what we are seeing here. There are many confounding variables that are not accounted for in this paper.”

‘Mass Outdoor Events and the Spread of an Airborne Virus: English Football and Covid-19’ by Matthew Olczak et al. was published in Covid Economics on 27 August.

https://cepr.org/content/covid-economics-vetted-and-real-time-papers-0#block-block-9

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.