You can definitely file this one under glass-half-full. I actually kind of admire the spin zone, to be honest. After all, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade — when life hands you a Super Bowl loss and subsequent globe-crippling pandemic, draw a vague connection between the two and argue that the former actually positively influenced the latter.
We’ve got to make our own silver linings during these crazy times and San Franciscans have evidently found theirs. More power to ’em.According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the San Fransisco 49ers blowing their 4th quarter Super Bowl lead to ultimately lose the game may have actually saved lives as it prevented a mass parade that likely would have seen millions gather together.
“It may go down in the annals as being a brutal sports loss,” Dr. Bob Wachter, the chair of UCSF’s department of medicine told the Wall Street Journal, “but one that may have saved lives.”
“A parade would have drawn as many as a million people to downtown San Francisco, and, as the WSJ notes, would have been a dark echo of a similar event during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak: an ill-fated decision in the city of Philadelphia to host a wartime morale parade. More than 200,000 people attended that parade, many infected with the deadly influenza, and the parade served as a “super-spreader” event that magnified Philadelphia’s pain. That parade has served as both a warning and a justification for the current social distancing and quarantining under which the country now operates.” [via Yahoo Sports]
All jokes aside, it’s a legitimate observation as the first cases of the virus were beginning to appear in Californa. As Yahoo Sports points out, “the very first patients with coronavirus in California were transferred to the hospital at the University of California-San Francisco the morning after the Super Bowl loss.” Had a championship parade ended up happening, there’s no telling how much faster the disease would have spread across the west coast.
Eric is a New York City-based writer who still isn’t quite sure how he’s allowed to have this much fun for a living and will tell anyone who listens that Gotham City is canonically in New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter @eric_ital for movie and soccer takes or contact him eric@brobible.com
