SANTA CLARA, Calif. _ A Super Bowl loss might have been a win for the Bay Area, doctors say, because the resulting celebration could have dramatically expedited the spread of the novel coronavirus to the region.
A victory for the 49ers over Kansas City Feb. 2 in Miami would have led to a championship parade down Market Street in downtown San Francisco three days later, as COVID-19 cases were in the early stages of spreading throughout California. The Bay Area began as the state's epicenter before Gov. Gavin Newsom's shelter-in-place order and Californians largely began staying home.
A story in the Wall Street Journal this week first brought up the idea of not having a championship parade being a massive win for the region in the battle against the pandemic. A Super Bowl victory celebration could have had devastating effects as hundreds of thousands flooded the streets and potentially exposed one another to the disease.
"It would not have taken much spread in early February for the thing to have gotten way out of hand," Dr. Bob Wachter, the chair of UC San Francisco's department of medicine, told the Journal. "That would've been enough to light the fire."
California has thus far avoided the massive casualties suffered by states like New York and New Jersey, with San Francisco the first major city to ban large public gatherings in early March. The rest of the country soon followed suit.
The results have been promising. The number of coronavirus patients in California hospitals has been lower than initial projections. California expected some 11,000 people needing treatment in hospitals, but that number was 3,015 as of Monday, Newsom said.
The Journal's story likened the situation to Philadelphia during the devastating spread of the Spanish Flu in 1918, which caused an estimated 20 to 50 million worldwide deaths. Some 200,000 gathered in Philadelphia for a parade that September of 1918, causing a massive spread that wasn't alleviated until the following June.
"Some of it was lucky breaks," Wachter said, "and this may be one of the lucky breaks that spared us from a much worse fate."
