Systematic Review of Public Health Measures at Sporting Mass Gatherings

Thirty-four articles assessing 37 sporting mass gatherings form the core of this systematic review. The analysis, conducted by Lucia Mullen, maps pre-pandemic and pandemic-era planning for events like the Olympic Games. It was published on the figshare platform in April 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze the reported effectiveness of multi-layered intervention packages, including bubble approaches and routine testing, across 37 events.
• Compare feasibility concerns linked to scalability issues for gatherings with many spectators versus smaller events.
• Assess how acceptability factors like perceived work burden and compliance levels influenced intervention outcomes.
• Identify the most common sporting mass gatherings studied, such as the Olympic Games which appeared in 10 articles.

Strengths

• Includes 34 peer-reviewed articles providing a structured evidence base.
• Applies a defined effectiveness framework to categorize 23 articles as effective, 3 as non-effective, and 6 as indeterminate.
• Covers both pre-pandemic and pandemic-era event planning, offering a temporal comparison.

Limitations

• The dataset is a single 94.8 KB PDF document, limiting computational analysis of underlying study data.
• Review scope is restricted to official sporting events, excluding other mass gathering types.
• Effectiveness assessments are based on published reports, not primary outcome data.

Provenance

Source

Systematic review published on figshare by author Lucia Mullen.

Collection Method

Literature search across Medline, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, Scopus, Web of Science, and other databases in June 2023 and July 2025.

Time Range

Studies published from 2000 onward, assessing events up to the search date.

Freshness

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Geography

Global, covering international sporting mass gatherings.