'It really makes me anxious': Cowboys could have more than 30,000 fans at Thanksgiving game

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to rip across the country, many Americans have made the difficult decision to hunker down for Thanksgiving — eschewing their usual family gatherings, and possibly even spending the day alone. 

The atmosphere at AT&T Stadium outside Dallas, meanwhile, will be markedly different.

The Dallas Cowboys are expected to host tens of thousands of fans at their traditional Thanksgiving Day game against the Washington Football Team on Thursday, possibly matching or exceeding the announced crowd of 31,700 that was on hand for their previous home game against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

It's the type of mass gathering that makes some public health experts uneasy, particularly as cases of COVID-19 continue to rise — both nationally and locally. According to state data, the number of active cases in Tarrant County — where AT&T Stadium is located — has nearly doubled in the past two weeks alone.

"It really makes me anxious," said Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown School of Public Health. "... I know that they’ve done it before. And my hope is that they’ll get away with it. But I worry a lot about events like this, right now, in the middle of this surge. I wish we weren’t doing this with fans."

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Cowboys spokesperson Rich Dalrymple declined to provide a crowd projection or capacity limit for Thursday's game, and a spokesperson for SeatGeek — the team's ticketing partner — declined comment when asked about ticket demand for the game.

The team has outlined a series of COVID-19 countermeasures that have been in place for its games, and touted the unique design of AT&T Stadium as an asset. The stadium has a retractable roof and massive end zone doors, which allow outside air to circulate throughout the stadium during a game. Dalrymple wrote in an email that both the roof and doors would be open Thursday.

"We are absolutely comfortable with the team’s plans (for attendance)," NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy added in an email. "More importantly, local public health experts and authorities have been comfortable with their plans."

In a league where attendance decisions have been left up to individual teams and local health officials, no team has hosted larger crowds than Dallas this season.

The Cowboys have hosted 25,750 fans per game, on average, during the pandemic and single-handedly accounted for more than 17% of the NFL's overall attendance — in just five games. And while six teams have moved to change their attendance plans amid the recent surge in cases, Cowboys officials have shown no signs of following suit.

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During an interview with a Dallas radio station Friday, Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones said the team did not plan to alter its stadium capacity for Thursday's game. Three days earlier, his father — team owner Jerry Jones — said on the same radio station that it had been the team's goal to "increase our fans as we went through the season."

"I'm very proud of the fact that we do it safely. We do it smartly," the elder Jones said on 105.3 The Fan. "(It's) really helpful, to say the very least, to be playing in front of those fans. And I see a continued aggressive approach to having fans out there."

State guidance in Texas currently allows sports venues to be filled up to 50% of normal capacity — which, at AT&T Stadium, would be roughly 40,000.

Public health officials in Texas have not released any evidence of COVID-19 transmission at Cowboys games so far this season, and Dalrymple said the team has not been contacted by local public safety and health officials for contact tracing.

However, residents in at least two Texas counties have told contact tracers that they attended a game shortly before testing positive, when they might have been contagious. WFAA-TV reported last week that there were eight such residents in Tarrant County. Six others have been identified in Denton County, according to county spokesperson Jennifer Rainey.

"However, none of the 6 cases could be concluded with the game being the source of infection," Rainey wrote in an email.

(The Cowboys have announced a total attendance of 128,750 at five home games.)

In response to a series of questions about attendance at Cowboys games, the Texas Department of State Health Services referred USA TODAY Sports to officials in Tarrant County, who did not respond to multiple requests for information.

Jha said he appreciated the Cowboys' fan safety protocols, and thinks they're taking some important steps to keep people safe. But he worries that those measures might no longer be enough. And he believes the risk at this juncture — with multiple vaccines nearing FDA approval — is too great.

“I totally get wanting to go to a football game. Our lives have been so upended in the last nine months," Jha said. "But we’re so close to the end zone here. And I just feel like adding any more burden to our hospitals, having more people unnecessarily get sick, it’s just not great."

Contributing: Jori Epstein

Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.