The fact that the 2021 European Football Championship presented a significant health risk in the second year of the pandemic and during the triumphant advance of the even more easily transferable Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 will probably not surprise anyone who has watched one or the other game on television.

Still, it was interesting to read the official figures in a report by Public Health England (PHE) last week.

As part of the Events Research Program (ERP), a program to assess the risk of Covid-19 transmission at public events, the PHE checked contact tracing data for connections to six major public cultural and sporting events between the end of June and the end of July.

Sibylle Anderl

Editor in the features section.

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The result: 87 percent of the contagions allegedly occurring in the context of these events were due to the European Football Championship, of which the largest part was due to the final in the 75 percent occupied Wembley Stadium. 2294 visitors, who were apparently infectious on the day of the game, led to 3404 new infections - despite the required evidence of either a negative test, a previous infection or a vaccination. For comparison: the tennis encounters at Wimbledon with fully open arenas were only associated with just under 600 infections that could have originated there.

This had been done better in the past: The 2010 soccer World Cup in South Africa during the H1N1 pandemic, the 2015 Africa Cup during an Ebola outbreak and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio during the Zika virus outbreak had epidemiological results . In order to be able to compare the risks of infection with the social and economic consequences of the cancellation of major events during the Covid 19 pandemic with the necessary sense of proportion, the World Health Organization set up a group of experts right at the beginning of the pandemic in spring 2020. In the Journal Lancet, a little later in April, some of the members presented a list of points that should be taken into account when organizing such events.An online course has been developed for the acquisition of the relevant risk assessment skills. At the same time, it was clear at the time: there was initially no empirical value for Covid-19.

Pop concert in Leipzig evaluated

It took a while before these could be generated in a reliable form.

Initially, the only statistical way that was essentially open was to correlate major sporting events with the available number of cases and deaths - a method that has to contend with many confounding factors.

But then the phase began in which all of a sudden major events were declared as scientific experiments all over the world.

The results of one of the first large experiments in Germany have now been published in the journal Nature Communications. On August 22, 2020, the singer Tim Bendzko performed in front of around 1,100 spectators in the Quarterback Immobilien Arena in Leipzig. The concert was organized by scientists from Halle (Saale). All participants had previously had negative PCR tests and had been equipped with a contact sensor. It was mandatory to wear FFP2 masks during the event. Three scenarios were examined: firstly, the visit without further restrictions, secondly, moderate restrictions in the sense of a checkerboard seating arrangement with twice as many entrances as normal, and thirdly, severe restrictions, which are set in pairs with 1,Passed 5 meters to the next pair and four times the number of entrances.