Systematic Review of Public Health Measures at Sporting Mass Gatherings

A systematic literature review analyzes 34 articles covering 37 sporting mass gatherings to evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility, and acceptability of public health interventions against respiratory pathogens. The review, conducted by Lucia Mullen, was published in 2026 and includes studies from databases searched in June 2023 and July 2025. It focuses on events like the Olympic Games and measures such as bubble approaches, testing, and masking.

Use Cases

• Classify intervention packages as effective, non-effective, or indeterminate based on the review's developed framework.
• Analyze the association between specific intervention types (e.g., bubble approaches, routine testing, masking) and reported outcomes across the 37 studied events.
• Identify common feasibility concerns linked to scalability issues and spectator numbers mentioned in the included articles.
• Extract data on acceptability factors such as perceived work burden, compliance levels, and stakeholder engagement from the review's synthesis.

Strengths

• Synthesizes evidence from 34 peer-reviewed articles, providing a consolidated view.
• Covers 37 distinct sporting mass gathering events, including 10 Olympic Games.
• Applies a defined effectiveness framework to categorize findings from 23 articles as effective.

Limitations

• The dataset is a single PDF document (39.8 KB), offering no structured, machine-readable data tables for analysis.
• Excludes predictive modeling studies and publications prior to 2000, limiting temporal and methodological scope.
• Sample size is constrained to the 34 articles meeting the review's inclusion criteria.

Provenance

Source

figshare, authored by Lucia Mullen.

Collection Method

Systematic review of databases including Medline, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, Scopus, Web of Science, and others.

Time Range

Studies included from 2000 onward, with database searches conducted in 2023 and 2025.

Freshness

Last updated April 2026, based on searches up to July 2025.

Geography

Global coverage of sporting mass gatherings, but specific geographic focus of individual studies is not detailed.