San Francisco doctors say the 49ers’ stunning loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV “may have saved lives.”
“It may go down in the annals as being a brutal sports loss,” the chair of UC San Francisco department of medicine, Dr. Bob Wachter, told the Wall Street Journal in a piece published Tuesday. “But one that may have saved lives.”(RELATED: Pearl Jam Postpones North American Tour Over Growing Coronavirus Concerns)
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“Some of it was lucky breaks,” he added. “And this may be one of the lucky breaks that spared us from a much worse fate.” (RELATED: SMOKE BREAK: David Hookstead’s Perfect Super Bowl Party)
The reason for Wachter’s comments is if the 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo and his San Francisco team had been able to hold its 20-10 lead against Patrick Mahomes’ Chiefs going into the fourth quarter and stop the Chiefs from its come-from-behind victory to win 31-20, it would have been the team by the bay that would have been holding huge celebrations across the town to celebrate the win.
That would have included a SB victory parade that would have involved hundreds of thousands of people. This was at the same time that SF doctors were dealing with their first cases of the coronavirus in early February.
“It is certainly hard to imagine a more high-risk situation,” UCSF COVID-19 expert Dr. Niraj Sehgal told the outlet.
And with Kansas City not reporting its first case of COVID-19 until mid-March, the teams’ downtown SB celebration appears to have went down with much fewer consequences, per TMZ.