Pandemic-era sports league operations as a new paradigm for local epidemic resilience

Strategic, coordinated, and rapid responses are essential when pathogens emerge, yet these responses are often mishandled during epidemics due to myriad factors, including entrenched socioeconomic and political constraints. Consequently, local communities are often left unprotected. Early in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the National Basketball Association (NBA) implemented a variation of standard public health measures, popularly termed the “bubble”, that kept the league transmission-free for the 2020 playoffs. The NBA “bubble” was a sophisticated system of risk stratification predicated on a strategic design of spatial, movement, and contact heterogeneities. Five years later, we examine its fundamental features and explore its potential application to future epidemics. We formalize the bubble’s mechanisms in the context of existing epidemiological theory, generate forecasts of management outcomes, and propose a theoretical framework that redirects epidemic modeling away from its traditional top-down control philosophy toward targeted protection and local resilience. The new framework can ultimately be used to support the design and local governance of community protections, particularly when centralized epidemic responses prove inadequate.