How the unlikely success of a small Italian club and the celebration and joy of its fans might have unknowingly helped spread this pandemic.
Compounding the horror, doctors have now raised a grim possibility: that Atalanta’s nights of European glory might directly have contributed to the virus’s spread. The first leg of that tie against Valencia took place at San Siro, in Milan. Atalanta played all of their Champions League home games at the venue this season, allowing for attendances more than twice as large as would have been possible at their own Stadio Atleti Azzurri d’Italia.
Fabiano di Marco, chief pneumologist at Bergamo’s largest hospital, fears it was also the start of catastrophe.
“I have heard a lot [of theories for why the virus has spread so aggressively in the region], I’ll say mine,” Di Marco told the newspaper Corriere della Sera. “On Feb. 19, 40,000 Bergamaschi [people from Bergamo] went to San Siro for Atalanta-Valencia. In buses, cars, on trains. A biological bomb, unfortunately.”
And now Seattle. Footie is really making this pandemic worse.
As COVID-19 fears grew, public officials and sports execs contemplated health risks — and debated a PR message — but let 33,000 fans into a Seattle Sounders soccer match, emails show.
On March 6, at 2:43 p.m., the health officer for Public Health — Seattle & King County, the hardest-hit region in the first state to be slammed by COVID-19, sent an email to a half-dozen colleagues, saying, “I want to cancel large group gatherings now.”
The county’s numbers — 10 known deaths and nearly 60 confirmed cases as of late morning — were bad and getting worse. Many local events had already been called off for fear of spreading the coronavirus. Oyster Fest. The Puget Sound Puppetry Festival. A Women’s Day speaker series at the Gates Foundation. King County had ordered a stop to in-person government meetings unless they were considered essential.
In the end, the match went on. Two days after the public health department wrote on Facebook, “We are making a recommendation to postpone or cancel events greater than 10-50 people,” officials in King County allowed a soccer match to be held with 33,000 fans, squeezed together.
How that happened is captured in hundreds of pages of emails exchanged among federal, state and local officials, as well as executives from the Sounders, Seahawks, Mariners and XFL Dragons. Those records, obtained by ProPublica and The Seattle Times, show how one meeting would beget another, one email would beget a dozen more, all while the virus was taking rapid hold.
VOW
April 19, 2020, 10:37pm
3
The Carnivale in Venice didn’t help, either.
Nava
April 20, 2020, 5:50am
4
Carnaval anywhere, in general, although many small places cancelled theirs. Valencia’s Fallas were cancelled.
Another vector of transmission between Italy and Spain was Erasmus students who returned home after classes were cancelled.
The pictures of Carnivale in Venice showed an empty square. I think it was canceled.
AK84
April 20, 2020, 10:25am
6
There is a work colleague of mine who was blaming the women’s march* on WhatsApp.
I work in a languages dept, we had an entire year of students studying abroad plus our intake of Erasmus students in the UK. A lot of the Erasmus students returned home very quickly in February, but our outgoing year abroad students trickled back into the country having followed the advice of our Foreign Office, and the advice given to them by the universities they were studying at in other countries.
Those that came home were immediately told to self-isolate for two weeks but some still in Italy and Spain have decided to stay and ride it out where they are, mainly those whose families might be in the vulnerable category or whose parents are key workers.