Wisconsin Study Shows Nearly Zero Coronavirus Transmission in Youth Sports

Tackle Football
AP Photo/Bill Wippert

A large study of youth sports in Wisconsin has found nearly zero transmission of the coronavirus among players, coaches, and support staff in youth sports.

The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health recently published a study following the health of 30,704 high school athletes who played a sport this past fall, and the study revealed just how useless a lockout of sports would have been as a preventive measure.

After the state Supreme Court shot down the governor’s plans to cancel all sports into the fall, schools restarted their sports programs in September. The students were required to wear masks while competing. Despite the warnings of doom and gloom by Democrats, the predicted super-spreading outbreak never materialized among the kids and their coaching staff.

The study revealed that the high school athletes participated in 16,898 practices and 4,378 games during the state’s fall schedule. But the transmission rate was not worrisome in the least. In fact, the rate of transmission among the high school athletes (32.6 cases per 100,000 person-days) was even lower than that of the general population of 14-17-year-old Wisconsin residents (38.1 cases per 100,000 person-days). Further, there seemed to be no statistical difference in transmission rates between contact and non or low-contact sports.

“Of the cases with a reported known source, 115 (55%) were attributed to 163 household contact followed by community contact outside sport or school (85, 41%), school 164 contacts (5, 2.4%), sport contact (1, 0.5%) and other (3, 1.4%),” the study reported (my bold).

So, according to what could be gleaned, only 2.4 percent of cases (only 164 cases total) were gotten at school, and only a single case was found to have been contracted while participating in a sport. One.

The researchers also insisted that masks did not seem to have an impact at all.

“After adjusting for local county COVID-19 incidence and school instructional delivery, face mask use was not associated with a decreased COVID-19 incidence in football, girls’ volleyball, boys’ soccer or cross country,” the researchers wrote.

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