Officials warn Super Bowl could be a superspreader
Kansas City Chiefs superfan Ty Rowton hugged strangers in the streets of Miami last year after watching his team win the Super Bowl and then joined hundreds of thousands of fans back home at a victory parade, thinking little of a mysterious virus that his buddies were beginning to talk about.
The championship seems like a lifetime ago. Now the Chiefs are preparing to play in the Super Bowl again, and the virus has morphed into a once-in-a-century pandemic that has health officials on edge as fans congregate at parties and bars for the game.
The nation’s top health officials sounded the alarm this week about the Super Bowl being a potential superspreader event, and they urged people to gather with friends over Zoom, not in crowds.
“I’m worried about Super Bowl Sunday, quite honestly. People gather, they watch games together. We’ve seen outbreaks already from football parties,” said Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “So I really do think that we need to watch this and be careful.”
The Super Bowl comes as the nation sees a dramatic drop in new virus cases — a sign that the infection spike from holiday gatherings is easing. The virus has killed more than 461,000 people in the U.S., but the seven-day rolling average for daily new cases went from 180,489 as of Jan. 22 to 125,854 as of Friday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Health officials fear the game could seed new cases at exactly the wrong time. Just last week, the new coronavirus strain that spread quickly in the United Kingdom was confirmed in Kansas after turning up in several other states. Other highly contagious variants also have scientists worried. States are racing to vaccinate before the newcomers become widespread and additional strains emerge.
After a long year of shutdowns, it remains to be seen whether Americans will heed the warnings for an event that was watched by more than 100 million people last year.
Rowton, who goes to games wearing an arrowhead on his head and a cape signed by players, won’t be hugging strangers this year. But he won’t exactly be following the advice of health officials either: He plans to eat barbecue and watch the game in a friend’s basement “man cave.” He will be unmasked with about 10 other fans.
“If you have 10 or 20 people you are meeting with, there is a very good likelihood that one or two of those people will have COVID-19,” said Dr. Dana Hawkinson, director of infection control for the University of Kansas Health System, which was inundated during the surge. “If you are in a small enclosed space, then three or four of those people will get it.”