Super Bowl 2021 A COVID-19 Superspreader Event? Experts, Fans Weigh In

The NFL had safety precautions for the tens of thousands of fans who watched Super Bowl LV in Tampa, Florida, on Sunday, but experts and social media users fear that the game may result in a massive number of new coronavirus cases.

Before roughly 22,000 attendees gathered at the Raymond James Stadium to watch the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers square off, the nation's top health officials were already worried about the Super Bowl becoming a COVID-19 superspreader event and urged fans to stay at home and watch the game with friends over Zoom.

“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, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Associated Press reported. “So I really do think that we need to watch this and be careful.”

Among the safety measures the NFL imposed for Sunday's game were mandatory mask-wearing, social-distancing, podded seating, touchless concession stands and other security checkpoints to ensure everyone's safety. The 22,000 attendees were spread across the stadium's 65,000 seats, with 30,000 cardboard cutouts of people occupying empty spaces between them.

"On paper it looks reassuring," Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Insider of the measures taken for the event. "But the reality is sobering."

The specialist noted that while a third of the attendees were healthcare workers who have received COVID-19 vaccines, the rest were not required to be vaccinated or tested for the virus in advance. He also said that alcohol increases the chances of people ignoring safety guidelines.

"Any time you have 25,000 potentially inebriated people together shouting, yelping and screaming in one place in the middle of a pandemic, you are bound to have transmission," he said.

Droplets that cause COVID-19 would travel much farther than six feet when a person is shouting or yelling, according to Chin-Hong. With the game lasting nearly four hours, the chances of people getting infected also increased due to the length at which they could have been exposed to aerosols.

Aside from health experts, fans and netizens also took to social media to express their frustration over the Super Bowl being held during a pandemic as well as people violating safety protocols during and after the event.

"The mask situation on the sidelines of the Super Bowl is stressful," actress and writer Ashley Nicole Black tweeted.

The 2021 Super Bowl comes as the U.S. just started to see a drop in new COVID-19 cases. To date, the virus has killed over 459,000 people, but data from Johns Hopkins University showed that the seven-day rolling average for daily new cases went from 180,489 as of Jan. 22 to 125,854 as of Friday.