- [Narrator] Picture the last game you attended.
(fans cheering)
The seats filled, the fans cheering,
concessions buzzing, and the lines,
well those are always too long.
Stadiums and arenas now sit empty
as leagues postponed or canceled games
because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The natural question is when will sporting events come back,
but to understand when, it's important to remember why
fans aren't filling the stadiums now.
- One of the things we've learned from watching Dr. Fauci
is the statement, we don't control the timeline.
The virus does.
- If that means not having any people in the audience
when the NBA plays, so be it.
- [Narrator] Sitting shoulder to shoulder with other fans,
reaching for a high-five after a big play,
and grabbing food from concessions
all make the game more fun and potentially more dangerous.
- I think about the stadium the same way
as I think about nursing homes,
cruise ships, jails and prisons.
It's among the highest risk areas.
- [Narrator] So let's take a look at the risks,
proximity, contact, and the shared environment,
to see why the stadium is primed
for the spread of the coronavirus.
First, proximity.
- [Peter] What the virus is trying to do is transfer itself
from somebody's nose or mouth to somebody else's
nose or mouth, and the easiest way for that virus
to do so is just going in directly.
- [Narrator] This typically happens through droplets.
When we talk, respiratory droplets can jump
from you to another person, but only if you're close.
- [Peter] That fluid droplet is a little bit heavy
and it's gonna fall within three feet
if somebody isn't there to catch it,
and it's not only three feet next to you,
it's three feet before and behind you as well.
- [Narrator] That's why the CDC recommends people keep
a distance of at least six feet from each other,
three feet plus a buffer, according to doctors.
Now, let's bring the game into it.
(referee whistles)
That cheering or yelling can propel
infectious seeding droplets beyond three feet.
Like a sneeze, the force of a scream can also create
much smaller particles called aerosols.
These are lighter, so they can linger in the air
for more time and travel further.
- The stadium setting is really conducive for that
because it's not only about the one-time immediate risk.
It's the amount of hours of contact,
so even though the one-time aerosol
is not gonna do much in the real world,
you have constantly people shouting over many hours.
At some point, the cumulative risk is going to be
greater than the actual individual risk of the act itself.
- [Narrator] In other words, the more exposure,
the higher the chance you'll be infected.
That brings us to the next important
risk factor, prolonged contact.
Not every interaction results in getting an infection.
(fans cheering)
- It's very unlikely for three people sitting next to
each other closely in the stadium to give it to each other
in a domino effect because the virus has to incubate
in the second person first before that second person
can then transmit it to the third person,
and incubation usually occurs within seven days.
- [Narrator] But games last for hours,
and that gives the virus plenty of opportunities to succeed
in spreading from one infected person
to several healthy people in their vicinity.
- In the stadium, one of the issues that makes it
very challenging to protect spectators
from COVID-19 is social contact.
From my experience, social contact is one of the joys
of even going to the stadium in the first place.
- [Narrator] On February 19th, before the coronavirus
had really taken hold in Italy,
a soccer match filled the stadium in San Siro.
While it's fairly difficult to pinpoint the game
as the key moment of transmission, two weeks later,
coronavirus cases in the Lombardy region shot up.
Experts have pointed to matches like that
as potential super-spreader events.
Fans went to hug, fist and chest-bump,
and revel in the emotion of the game over and over again.
- I think of the stadium as an adult preschool.
There's a lot of slobbering, there's a lot of secretions.
- [Narrator] If the virus fails to directly land
on a person's face and infect them that way,
it has other means.
Let's take the celebratory high-five.
- So you're touching somebody's hand with the high-five,
and even if you're able to stay away during the high-five,
you're going to be potentially contaminating your hands
and then when you touch your face,
you're wiping that sweat away,
you're going to be introducing potential virus
into your nose or your mouth.
Contaminated surfaces are another key risk factor,
and it's not just body parts.
Think bathrooms, concession stands, bleachers,
hand railings, shared food and beverages,
and the containers they come in.
Tens of thousands of people can touch some of these objects
and smear them with virus that can end up
on someone's hands and then face.
This indirect mode of infection
is known as fomite transmission.
While scientists think it's less efficient
than direct transmission through droplets,
contaminated surfaces are bound in stadiums.
To prevent fomite transmission,
good personal hygiene is critical.
That means constant handwashing or hand sanitizing.
- Perhaps the most important challenge
in the stadium is human.
- [Narrator] You might be able to control your own hygiene
and wear your own mask, but what about the thousands
of fans in seats around you?
- To get through this is going to require
a great deal of social trust.
Washing your hands in social trust.
Covering your cough is social trust.
- [Narrator] Wearing a mask serves as a barrier,
limiting how far your potentially virus-laden droplets
can fly and the number of surfaces they can contaminate.
With COVID-19, there's a fair amount
of asymptomatic transmission, so people who don't feel sick
are more likely to show up to games
and then spread the virus.
Without widespread testing, it's harder to identify
mild cases and isolate them.
- We're trying to map out, we sell about
85,000 season tickets including students.
So if you have 103,000 seats, that gives you
18,000 empty seats after your season ticket base,
and so, physically all 85,000 people would not fit
if we have to socially distance.
- [Narrator] Texas A&M athletic director Ross Bjork
says it's too early to say what, if anything,
will change before the fall football season.
Games for now are still on.
- Things were canceled pretty much on a uniform basis
and a lot of coordination, but as things start to
go the other way and open up,
there's not a clear indication of okay,
this governing body can make this decision
for all of college sports.
- [Narrator] That question is playing out across America
as economies start to open up again.
Texas was among the first states
to reboot certain industries while trying
to balance medical and economic risks.
That hasn't included sports yet but.
- As we look at procedures around best practices
for restaurants, they're looking at all those things
so I think we can in a lot of ways
model what the restaurant industry is doing.
- [Narrator] Restaurants have limited
the number of customers that can come in.
For fans, a big part of the transition back to the stadium
will be adjusting to a new normal.
- I think an important corollary, I think about a lot
is before and after 9/11.
So before 9/11, you go to a stadium,
you wouldn't have expected a metal detector.
You wouldn't expect a patdown, and now that's,
we're waiting in lines and queues for that, right.
That's expected.
- [Narrator] For stadiums, it could mean
playing the games with fewer fans or none at all,
limiting concessions, opting for mobile payments,
and even giving spectators entrance and exit times.
- That past visual of what the game was like
is going to be very different in the near future,
and I think that's okay, and in fact I think
people will expect that in order to feel comfortable.