Doctor says Chiefs’ Super Bowl win likely saved lives during COVID-19 pandemic
The Chiefs’ victory over the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LIV resulted in a really big parade through the streets of Kansas City.
Fans may recall a police chase that took place down the parade route hours before the celebration began. Had there been a parade in San Francisco that week, one doctor fears something worse may have happened.
A widespread transmission of COVID-19.
Dr. Niraj Sehgal, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, said during a recent presentation that the Chiefs’ comeback win may have been a “gift” for his city.
“People may not remember this that well, but Super Bowl weekend, in some ways, with apologies to the 49ers’ fans, the gift we may have been given was the 49ers losing,” Sehgal said in Zoom call the school shared on YouTube.
“If you think about what happened that weekend, had the 49ers won, and there were parades, and parties at that time, that may have had impact that I haven’t seen actually described.”
Sehgal is co-lead of UCSF’s COVID-19 command center, which was set up the same day Patrick Mahomes led the Chiefs’ comeback victory over the 49ers.
Fans in San Francisco don’t want to be reminded of that evening, Feb. 2 in Miami, but Sehgal remembers it well.
“It’s a date that I will never forget, because the Super Bowl Sunday was actually the night that we stood up formally, our command center,” Sehgal said. “And the reason for that is another — again, it’s funny to call it a gift — the gift of we had, two of the first patients in the country that required hospitalization.
“And they arrived in the middle of the night, I will never forget sitting in that ambulance bay when those first two patients rolled up, a husband and wife who looked terrified because of everything around them. And it also forced our organization to kind of, we were in the game quickly and within five days we became the regional and national experts on how to do this, because everyone else was three to five days behind us.”
San Francisco initiated its stay-at-home order on March 17, and the city has had just 13 coronavirus-related deaths, per the Atlantic.
Not having a parade with fans packed tightly on the streets of San Francisco in early February may have helped the city flatten the curve at a time when hardly anyone was using that term.
Scott Ostler, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote: “The old expression is, ‘I’d rather be lucky than good.’ The Bay Area has been both.
“And the 49ers’ Super Bowl loss? Now, it doesn’t seem quite so disastrous.”
This story was originally published April 13, 2020 at 10:46 AM.
