Do you know how long the NFL season is? It lasts from September until January, with all but one set of games being complete by the end of December. Your paper that looked from Aug-Dec includes all of the normal season games from the NFL, minus 16, but none of the post season games (13 games). Out of the total NFL games (269), your paper should include 240. 89% of the data set for the NFL is in fact the exact same games (aside from the potential cherry picking of data in your study, but we don't need to get into that).

Here's the real difference. Your paper is 20% NFL games, and 80% NCAA games. They lump all of the games with in person attendance together and judge that entire batch as a group. Now, from this more recent study, we know that games with <5000 people didn't show any trend towards increased Covid spikes. We don't have the attendance numbers for the NCAA games (a serious limitation of that study, but that's okay), but I really struggle to imagine that it was higher than the NFL games during that same period. If your data set is dominated by data that doesn't match the rest of the data, that can easily skew results.

Now, I can't prove that without doing a study of my own, but it's a perfectly reasonable explaination for why these studies got different results. If you read the conclusions of BOTH of these studies, they talk about limitations. One of the limitations of your study is exactly what has been stated here:

>First, owing to data limitations, we considered in-person attendance as a 0 or 1 binary variable. Specifically, while in-person attendance numbers were available for NFL games, they were not available for NCAA games. Explicit consideration of attendance numbers may change the estimation.

There are also additional limitations on this study that they specifically said should be followed up on:

>Third, we also did not account for the spillover effects to the counties adjacent to the ones hosting NFL or NCAA games.

This is one of the limitations that OP's study specifically was looking at. They also discuss your study and why they think they got different results:

>It is important to note that our study was distinct from and comes to different conclusions than a 2021 study that examined in-person attendance in NFL and NCAA games and detected no increase in COVID-19 cases in 3 ways. First, Toumi et al only included 19.1% of NFL games, whereas our study included every game. Second, our study examined both in-county and contiguous county COVID-19 cases whereas Tuomi et al only considered in-county spread. Third, our study examined the number of fans in attendance whereas Toumi et al6 only included a dichotomous measure indicating fan or non–fan attended games. Consideration of these factors may explain the differing results.

You're trying to spin this as bad science, and I guarantee you that the authors of your study would disagree. This is important expansion of previous work. There is no single source of truth in science, and you can have different results among similar studies; Often deeper dives will tell you why this occurs and gives a more complete answer. That's what OP's study is doing.

>51 NBA games happened this week with close to 20,000.

>Where are all the outbreaks? It's indoors and should be worse then NFL games and yet nothing.

Maybe because a lot of people have been vaccinated now? Weird, it's almost like vaccination works to help us get back to a normal life. How strange.

EDIT: I had a math error. Fixed it.

Ok, for the SIXTH time, what is your source on your claim on these claims of yours:

> BECAUSE THEY [the authors] ALREADY KNOW THE CAUSE WAS THE BETA VARIANT

>The cause of the increase in cases was the Beta Variant and nothing else

Also:

>The same data was collected outside of the Beta outbreak in another paper and all of the correlation and inferred connections disappeared.

> One set occurred Aug-Dec 2020 and they also looked at NCAA games.

Ok, so it's not the same data and you admit your first statement was incorrect?