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CDC Recommendation to Stop Football and Wrestling Not Received Well

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It appears that one of the more recent suggestions on how to stop the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is not going over well in many circles, especially in the world of team sports. That’s because the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are now recommending that nearly every school in America should cancel football, wrestling and band until COVID is under control.

Taking particular aim at what it essentially labels an unworkable and unwelcome solution is none other than CNN, which in a recent article by senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen said that “such out-of-touch advice has been a hallmark of many CDC recommendations long before the pandemic began, and the agency needs to do better.”

As part of its guidance on January 6, the CDC advised schools to "cancel or hold high-risk sports and extra-curricular activities virtually" any time a community has a "high" COVID-19 transmission rate.

The CDC then gave football and wrestling as examples of high-risk sports and said that "high-risk extracurricular activities are those in which increased exhalation occurs, such as activities that involve singing, shouting, band, or exercise, especially when conducted indoors."

CNN had asked CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky about the shut-down-football guidance and in a statement, Walensky said the agency "prioritized academics over athletics because of the increased risks involved in some extracurricular sports. When followed, our school guidance has been incredibly effective. In the fall, 99 percent of schools were able to remain open during the intense delta wave of COVID."

Dr. William Schaffner, an adviser to the CDC for four decades, said it's "unlikely, unreasonable and unrealistic" to think Americans will follow this particular suggestion. "Making public health recommendations — they are not a platonic ideal," Schaffner added. "They have to work in the real world."

"As we say in Tennessee, that dog won't hunt," Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told CNN.

According to the CNN article, Paul Imhoff, president of The School Superintendents Association, said that while schools have gone to great lengths to curb the spread of COVID-19, he doesn't know of any schools that have recently cancelled activities such as football or band or choir. Such activities, he said, are "important to students' mental health."

"As schools are making decisions about having choir and band and wrestling, it's about making sure our kids are healthy in every way. I think everyone's doing their best to take care of the whole child," said Imhoff, a school superintendent in Ohio.

Then CNN got even more direct in criticizing the CDC. Part of the problem, it says, is that CDC scientists are sometimes stuck in a bubble.

"You've got nerds – literally science nerds – who are writing these things," it quoted Dr. Otis Brawley, who worked with the CDC on cancer guidance while he was chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society from 2007 to 2018.

Brawley added, though, that the CDC is often in a tough spot. For example, it's clear there have been documented COVID-19 outbreaks among choirs and so on the one hand it makes sense to advise schools to stay away from singing. But on the other hand, it's unrealistic to think that schools would cancel band, choir and school musicals now or at any other period of high transmission.

"I really feel for the people at the CDC," he said. "They're damned if they do, and they're damned if they don't."

In her statement to CNN, Walensky said the CDC "developed our school guidance knowing school administrators, teachers and parents were looking to us at CDC to get their children back in the enriching environment of the classroom and it was a priority to get our children back to school safely," adding that "vaccines are available for school-aged children, which adds another layer of protection and enhances the school guidance."

Spokespersons for the superintendents' association and the National Association of Secondary School Principals said the CDC did not reach out to them to confer about the guidance on school sports and extra-curricular activities.