Millions of Americans will heed the warnings of public health officials on Thursday. Instead of participating in a traditional Thanksgiving with large gatherings of family and friends, they'll connect virtually or not at all, doing their part to tamp down a nationwide surge of COVID-19 infections.
Meanwhile, on the edge of reality, tens of thousands of football fans will gather at AT&T Stadium for the Dallas Cowboys' Week 12 game against the Washington Football Team. They'll arrive at the invitation of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who insists the gathering will be safe and said as recently as last week that he hoped attendance surpasses its previous season high of 31,700. A crowd of that size technically falls within NFL guidelines, but that goal is roughly twice what any other team has hosted and has mortified public health officials around the country.
"At this point, none of this makes any sense, because of the level the virus is at," said Eric S. Rubenstein, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health. "Also, importantly, they need to set an example. The NBA did a nice job of this with their bubble. The NFL, not so much. They need to say that even if the risk might not be great here in this particular situation, we need people to know that we need to hunker down and not do this kind of activity. Sending this mixed message is sort of the system-level problem of all of this COVID stuff. The organization should take some responsibility rather than placing it on people deciding whether to show up or not."
For the other game on Thanksgiving Day, the Detroit Lions will have no fans at Ford Field. (The game between the Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers, originally scheduled for Thursday night, has been moved to Sunday.) In a statement provided to ESPN, the Cowboys said they did not have an official projected attendance for Thursday and that "capacity is determined through coordination between state and local health officials, along with the CDC and the NFL."
During a season controlled closely by pandemic protocols, the NFL and NFL Players Association have issued mandates about behavior as important as mask wearing and as minor as postgame jersey swaps. But the league has left decisions about game attendance to the individual teams, stipulating only that their plans align with state and local regulations. In all, 19 of 32 teams have invited paid fans to at least one home game. (A handful of the remaining 13 have allowed between 250 and 500 family members of players and staff to attend.)
Jones has taken advantage of that decision, as well as the relatively lax pandemic policies of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, to host games in a way that runs counter to every reasonable expectation of good public health. Abbott has capped attendance at sporting events to 50% of capacity, which for the Cowboys' AT&T Stadium would be about 40,000, and Jones has sold a total of 128,750 tickets to five games. The Cowboys' average of 25,750 fans per game is 64.9% higher than the next-closest team. Their games have been among the country's most heavily attended events -- of any kind -- during a pandemic in which public health officials have discouraged even much smaller gatherings.
None of this should be a surprise. If anyone was going to maximize sports attendance during a pandemic, it was Jones -- the NFL's biggest showman. His power in league circles effectively means that no one can stop him from excessive behavior. His zeal to set a league record for attendance at Super Bowl XLV, for example, led to a fiasco in which 1,250 seats were declared unsafe hours before kickoff.
League officials have publicly backed Jones' approach to attendance during the pandemic, saying they have received no official report of case clusters tracked to a game anywhere in the NFL this season. But neither the league nor the Cowboys are actively tracing fans after games. Instead, they are relying mostly on local contact tracers who are struggling nationwide to provide accurate and full accounts of viral spread. Tarrant County (Texas) reported last week that at least eight fans who have attended Cowboys games this season have later tested positive for COVID-19, but county health officials stressed that they could not determine whether any of them contracted the disease at a game.
According to the Cowboys: "As of November 25, local public safety and health officials have not made any reports to AT&T Stadium officials for the purpose of contact tracing for any individuals who have attended any of the home games this year. Our primary goal at AT&T Stadium is the health and safety of our fans."
Contact tracing is an effective tool for judging safety of fans at football games when local viral counts are low, Rubenstein said, but not at the current levels of uncontrolled community spread. COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have increased 49% across the country over the past 14 days, according to the New York Times' tracker, and deaths have increased by 62%. Texas, meanwhile, is averaging 11,725 new cases per day over the past week, the second-highest total among states in the nation during that time period.
"There's just no way you can rely on [local contact tracing] right now," Rubenstein said. "Especially in a football stadium of 30,000 people. It's a huge logistical endeavor. People might be coming from out of state. How do you track it then? It seems to me that they're sort of covering their ears and taking the word of a lack of evidence. What's the saying? 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.'"
The NFL has earned praise for providing its product in its traditional time and format, a rarity in the sports world during the pandemic. And of the roughly 8,000 employees it has monitored on a daily or weekly basis, only 270 returned confirmed positive tests between Aug. 1 and Nov. 14. The NFL has continued to evolve and strengthen its protocols, in conjunction with the NFLPA, amid the current rise in cases. But there is little that Dr. Allen Sills, the league's chief medical officer and primary architect of the league's approach, can do or say when it comes to attendance.
Sills put it artfully during a conference call last week, saying the issue of fans in stadiums is a "collaborative decision that's not made strictly by us in the New York office." The best the league office can do, in this case, is develop and promote awareness campaigns for owners who decide to host fans. When asked about the NFL's approach, Sills said the primary tenets include:
asking fans to report a positive test if they recently attended a game
encouraging teams to survey their fans directly, which some have done
communicating with local public health authorities
requiring each stadium to name an Infection Control Officer to monitor stadium employees
urging fans not to attend if they experience COVID-19 symptoms
To be clear, the league has been bullish about adding some fans to games this season. Commissioner Roger Goodell has been advocating publicly for it since September. Every ticket sold is additional revenue, as well as a bridge to ticket sales in 2021. But in the Cowboys' case, permission has exceeded good judgment. Look no further than the Houston Texans, who, operating under the same state guidelines as the Cowboys, have limited attendance to an average of 12,409 per game. The largest college football crowds this season have all come at Texas A&M, according to the NCAA, but none have exceeded 27,114.
Speaking on 105.3 The Fan radio last week, Jones said the size of AT&T Stadium, as well as its retractable roof and end zone doors, make it especially conducive to hosting big events in a pandemic. According to the team, the stadium's east-west layout allows for natural air flow view typical Texas wind patterns. The stadium's air conditioning was altered to pull in fresh rather than recirculated air, the team said, and all air filters were replaced and upgraded. Like other NFL teams, the Cowboys require fans to wear masks and to sit in pods while in the stands.
"I see a continued aggressive approach to having fans out there," Jones said. "And that's not being insensitive to the fact that we got our COVID and outbreak. Some people will say it is, but not when you're doing it as safe as we are and not when we're having the results we're having. Literally, we have had no one report that they've had gotten any contact with COVID from coming to our football game."
Rubenstein and Dr. Jill Weatherhead, an assistant professor of infectious diseases and tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, both cast doubt on Jones' assertions on the value of the stadium's configuration. Rubenstein noted that parts of the building -- such as bathrooms -- are as enclosed as any other indoor environment. The enforceability of mask-wearing and pods also remains in question.
Jones seems to understand the dangers of the pandemic. He has paid for his players and staff to live in an unofficial "bubble" -- voluntary stays in a local hotel that limit their exposure to the community -- during parts of training camp and the regular season. But in the bigger picture, he has pushed in a way that no one else in the league has contemplated. It's not only dangerous for the local community, but it frankly diminishes the NFL's otherwise thorough and relatively responsible approach to playing in the pandemic.
As Jones bragged about his attendance figures, in fact, the most recent trend within the league has been to eliminate capacity -- as the Baltimore Ravens, Philadelphia Eagles and others recently announced -- rather than add.
"In a time when there is largely uncontrolled viral transmission, a gathering of thousands of people in close contact and is nonessential, it's just incredibly risky and could lead to widespread disease," Weatherhead said. "The question to ask is, 'Is this really appropriate and worth it, in the setting of a surge in cases in the community?' And the second part is that we're asking people to make major sacrifices, to be away from family and friends. Everybody should be held to that same standard."