Fireworks in Tampa Bay ahead of the Super Bowl. Photo: Douglas P. DeFelice/Getty Images
The NFL's giant COVID-19 experiment ends Sunday with the improbable feat of an on-time Super Bowl, capping a season with no canceled games.
Why it matters: The season suggests that with the right resources, safety measures and cooperation — all of which have been lacking in the general U.S. response — life can go on during the pandemic without uncontrolled spread of the virus.
The big picture: The NFL decided early on that it wouldn't require its thousands of players, coaches and other staff to live in a "bubble," as other sports leagues had done.
- Instead, the league scaled up the public health basics of social distancing, testing, contact tracing and isolation across all 32 teams. To prevent spread, officials were prepared to postpone games or bench players.
Jeff Miller, the NFL's executive vice president of communications, public affairs and policy, told Axios: "The approach we took was to appreciate that there was an expectation that individuals would get COVID — and what could we do to prevent it from spreading throughout our facilities."
- "Our protocols were built on that premise — that living in our 32 communities during a pandemic was a risk, but we wanted to ensure that as best as possible we could prevent" virus spread.
Between the lines: Some of the NFL's findings were published by the CDC — including what the league learned about transmission of the virus.
- The most important changes the league had to make over time related to "our evolution of what a high-risk contact was," Miller said.
The league discovered that risky contacts with an infected person weren't limited to 15-minute interactions within 6 feet. The definition instead became more complex, factoring in time, distance, ventilation and mask-wearing.
- "Those four factors all had an interplay within them, which was, in our experience, vastly more complicated than six feet and 15 minutes," Miller said.
The bottom line: "We never saw the virus transmitted across the line of scrimmage," Miller said — even when players who later tested positive participated in the game.
- The league was able to confirm this was the case through genetic sequencing.
Go deeper: Super Bowl preview