Winter Sports Pose New Risks: Transmission soars during indoor exercise, but can we stay safe?
Heavy breathing, higher lung volumes, and limited airflow indoors—these three factors will increase COVID-19 particle spread at a disastrous rate during this winter’s highschool indoor sports season. Will BB&N sports teams be at risk, or will our hospital-grade ventilation, high mask-compliance rates, and non-existent viral spread make indoor sports safe this year?
Some of the most dangerous environments for spreading COVID-19 are non-socially-distanced indoor exercise and singing. A Queensland University of Technology study found exercising/recovering participants exhaled three times more aerosolized particles than normal. For example, in March 2020, during a choir practice in Washington, one symptomatic singer inflected 87% of the participants. The CDC explicitly stated that singing “augmented” the transmission, demonstrating that these large exhalations where people breathe faster and deeper can transmit coronavirus particles at a much faster rate.
This news does not bode well for indoor exercise at BB&N, and neither does the peak lung capacity of our student-athletes. Forced expiratory volume (FEV1), or the amount of air one can exhale with full force in one second, is maximized around the ages 18-20. Studies have also found a loose correlation between athletes and higher FEV1. This fact makes winter sports for highschoolers all the more dangerous: athletes are taking deeper breaths, breathing more frequently, and expelling a greater volume of particles with each breath. If an athlete exhales viral particles, this multiplies the risk of transmission to the people around them. On top of that, winter sports will primarily be indoors, which increases transmission by an astronomical amount. Last February, Japanese researchers who studied clusters of COVID-19 cases across different cities concluded, “the odds that a primary case transmitted COVID-19 in a closed environment was 18.7 times greater compared to an open-air environment.”
If you have not been scared away from winter sports yet, there is some reassuring news. First off, indoor ventilation varies widely across different school and gym buildings. As of mid-January, BB&N has stated on their website that they adjusted ventilation timing to run day and night this year instead of only when the buildings are occupied. The school has also replaced its air filters with MERV 13 filters. Pre-pandemic, most educational buildings had filters ranging from MERV 6 to MERV 8. MERV filter ratings are dependent on their removal efficiency of different particle sizes, and the filters newly installed by BB&N meet recommended specifications for removing the majority of COVID-19 particles.
So far, we have “not seen viral spread” within the school, according to a letter from the Athletics Department on January 7. While that does mean that our current safety measures have worked well, winter sports will pose new threats. Really, the success and safety of our winter session will depend primarily on the students. Wearing masks that cover your face tightly and stay above your nose, being diligent about maintaining social distancing, and maintaining these recommendations outside the BB&N campus will ultimately determine how safe we can be while playing sports this winter.
