Recently updated guidance from the NC Health and Human Services on contact sports and amateur sports programs “strongly recommends only playing sports in which participants can maintain social distancing.” Those sports are reported to include golf, cycling, disc golf, swimming, singles tennis, running, track and field and dance.
“Playing contact sports definitely presents risk,” said Emily Sickbert-Bennett, PhD, MS, associate professor in the division of infectious diseases in an interview with WRAL’s Go Ask Mom.
But the risk depends on how much sustained contact that players have between each other. A study of nearly 500 matches in the Netherlands, to see how often players came in close contact with each other, found 98% of the time there was little or no risk that players would transfer the virus to each other. Netherlands, officials studied nearly 500 soccer matches to see how often players came in close contact with each other. The study found that 98% of the time, there was very little or no risk that players would transmit the virus to each other.
“I think that is really important,” Sickbert-Bennett said in the article. “The amount of time they are really close to each other is minimal. It’s not a no-risk situation. If one of those kids was positive and let out a big cough or puff of air and that happened to be the 10 seconds they were three inches from someone else’s face, trying to get the ball away from them, that could certainly be a transmission event. But the majority of their interactions are not like that.”
Read the article here.