Patrick Mahomes may have played double-hero without even knowing it.
The Chiefs’ stud quarterback not only led a comeback to win the Super Bowl in February, but also might have done San Francisco a service by wiping out the 49ers parade that, in hindsight, could have been dangerous near the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It may go down in the annals as being a brutal sports loss, but one that may have saved lives,” Dr. Bob Wachter, the chair of University of California San Francisco’s department of medicine, told the Wall Street Journal.
On Feb. 2 in Miami, the 49ers led 20-10 entering the fourth quarter before Mahomes captained a comeback for the Chiefs’ 31-20 victory. That same day, according to the Journal, doctors in the Bay Area were already handling the region’s first COVID-19 cases.
Had the 49ers hung on to the lead, a parade back in San Francisco would have followed with hundreds of thousands of fans — the kind of gathering that has since been banned across the country as more information came out about the dangerous spread of coronavirus.
“It is certainly hard to imagine a more high-risk situation,” said Dr. Niraj Sehgal, the leader of UCSF’s Covid-19 command center.
While San Francisco was still mourning the 49ers’ loss the morning after the Super Bowl, Sehgal’s command center went live with multiple patients. As of Tuesday, the city had 957 confirmed cases and 15 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.
Kansas City, meanwhile, hosted the Chiefs’ parade on Wednesday, Feb. 5. The city’s first known coronavirus case was not reported until March 18.
“Some of it was lucky breaks, and this may be one of the lucky breaks that spared us from a much worse fate,” Wachter told the newspaper.