Virginia, USA – Take a professional sports team to a new city frequency Big taxpayer-funded stadium subsidies involved, but a new investigation indicates that it carries a question Health status: a Increase inside death toll go through influenza.
“Most, if not all, of the sports venues in the cities we studied received direct or indirect public funding,” said Brad Humphreys, a professor and researcher at West Virginia University’s School of Business and Economics .
“Since 2000, state and local governments in the U.S. have invested nearly $20 billion in new stadiums, roughly $1 billion a year. Typically, these subsidies take the form of government checks that fund team owners through bond issuance for Build their stadiums,” he told a university news conference.
But these new stadiums are also expensive in other ways. U.S. cities that bought specialized equipment between 1962 and 2016 saw a whopping 24 percent increase in flu deaths after the equipment arrived, the researchers said.
The study analyzed teams from the Major League Baseball (MLB), National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), and NBA National Hockey League (NHL).
“Our finding that people in cities with sports teams are more likely to get sick than people in cities without sports teams has the potential to change the way we think about hosting professional sporting events,” he said. Humphreys.
“We hope that taxpayers will be less likely to subsidize professional sports venues if they realize that these teams are making them sicker, burdening the health care system and hurting business profits when employees take sick leave.”
When NFL teams moved to cities that had never had a professional sports team before, there was an average 17 percent increase in flu deaths, the analysis showed. This equates to 13 additional deaths per year.
When NBA teams relocated, flu deaths increased by 4.7 percent. Major League Baseball (MLB) has been least affected, with three new deaths a year.
But the NHL had the biggest impact, with a 24.6 percent increase in flu deaths per 100,000 people. This equates to approximately 20 flu deaths per city per year.
“As to why hockey is so deadly, we think it has to do with the timing of the season and where the teams are located,” said Jane Ruseski, a professor and researcher at the John Chambers School of Business and Economics. “The NHL season has very little to do with the flu season. Seams overlap, and NHL teams are more likely to be in cooler cities.”
He said it was impossible to conclude that the overlap of flu seasons and sports leagues was a major factor in flu mortality.
“Since the seasons almost always take place at the same time each year, we don’t know what would happen if the NHL played in the summer,” Ruseski said in a statement.
The researchers used 54 years of flu death data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 122 cities, along with the arrival dates of new devices.
They controlled for factors associated with the spread of the virus, such as city population, temperature or precipitation, and the major flu strains per year.
Alexander Cardazzi, who worked on the study, said the same trend may apply to COVID-19. Cardazzi is now an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia.
“Sporting events in stadiums bring large numbers of people into close quarters,” Kardazi explained. He warned that “these fans touch many surfaces, talk, yell, and human-to-human contact like high fives” that could spread the flu and COVID-19. Gatherings in bars, restaurants and homes to watch games create similar conditions.
The findings were published in a recent issue of the Sports Economics Review.
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