Whether they were football fans or not, doctors at the University of California San Francisco’s COVID-19 command center didn’t get much of a chance to watch the 49ers lose the Super Bowl to the Kansas City Chiefs on the first Sunday in February.
That’s because they were too busy treating some of the first cases of coronavirus to crop up in the Bay Area.
Looking back on that loss they were unable to watch, some UCSF medical experts have concluded the 49ers losing the Super Bowl was actually a good thing for the city of San Francisco and the surrounding region, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Had the 49ers beat the Chiefs, a victory parade would have been held in San Fran days after the first coronavirus cases arrived in the region. And, from what we now know about how the virus spreads through mass gatherings, that parade could have turned victory for the team into a big loss of life in the city.
Hundreds of thousands of fans, some of whom would have undoubtedly been carrying the virus without knowing it, gathering on the streets of San Francisco could’ve made it a super-spreading event. San Francisco has done a good job of containing the spread of COVID-19, but that may not have been possible had the virus spread through hordes of celebrating fans.
“It may go down in the annals as being a brutal sports loss, but one that may have saved lives,” Dr. Bob Wachter, the chair of UCSF’s department of medicine, told The Journal. “It would not have taken much spread in early February for the thing to have gotten way out of hand. That would’ve been enough to light the fire. It made us all feel a bit better about the 49ers’ loss.”
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