By Andrew Beaton, Louise Radnofsky | Wall Street Journal
It was early October, and the NFL had a problem. It wasn’t just that players and staff for the Tennessee Titans were continuing to test positive in an outbreak that shook the NFL’s season. It wasn’t even that the league was learning that the virus was able to rush through holes in its protocols.
The NFL was slowly discovering something far deeper: a core tenet of Covid-19 transmission wisdom—how to define when individuals are in “close contact”—was just wrong.
The safety of interactions during this global pandemic had been for months measured by a stopwatch and a tape measure. The guidance was that someone had been exposed to the virus if they had been within six feet of an infected person for more than 15 minutes. It was drilled into everyone for so long it became coronavirus gospel.
