Jonas Dehning, Sebastian B Mohr, Sebastian Contreras, Philipp Dönges, Emil N Iftekhar, Oliver Schulz, Philip Bechtle, Viola Priesemann
Large-scale events like the UEFA Euro 2020 football (soccer) championship offer a unique opportunity to quantify the impact of gatherings on the spread of COVID-19, as the number and dates of matches played by participating countries resembles a randomized study. Using Bayesian modeling and the gender imbalance in COVID-19 data, we attribute 840,000 (95% CI: [0.39M, 1.26M]) COVID-19 cases across 12 countries to the championship. The impact depends non-linearly on the initial incidence, the reproduction number R, and the number of matches played...
January 18, 2023: Nature Communications