Football crowds and covid:

QUOTE: ...yet the college football season is well under way and producing "real-world data" to help determine whether it's finally time to obsess less about virions and more about, say, Big 10 rankings.

"I think it's really unfortunate," Dr Fauci has remarked, taking his cue from a CNBC host who noted crowded stadiums and fed him this prompt: "I thought COVID is about to have a feast. What do you think?"

It must be said this novel type of clinical trial isn't randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled. It's not controlled in the least. What it is, though, is huge.

Let's look at one: Penn State vs Auburn, played in the "Happy Valley" of Pennsylvania which is home to the Nittany Lions. Home fans arrived in uniform with white shirts, white sweaters, white body-paint — a "White Out" across a stadium not exactly built for social distancing (capacity: 106,572). I have nephews — young and trim alums — who must contort themselves while fitting into spaces tighter than the cheap seats on a puddle-jumper airline.

Data? According to the university, seven-day-average infectivity rates among students have fallen consistently from 1 percent on the day of the Auburn game to 0.2 percent currently. Students in quarantine, either because they show COVID symptoms or fall within a contact-tracing chain, have dropped from 34 to 4, this in a home-campus population of 46,000. These trends hold for the entire season to date. (The Auburn game was played on September 18; there have been home games before and since then.)