Ecstatic fans cheering and hugging at the Champion’s League Atalanta-Valencia game in February boosted the spread of the coronavirus, the mayor of the worst-hit Italian city said Tuesday.
Bergamo, in the
northern Lombardy region, is now Italy’s most-affected province, with nearly
6,500 infections.
Its football team
Atalanta had been having a stellar season, with a historic Champions League
qualification, and its game against Spanish rival Valencia on February 19 at
the San Siro stadium in Milan had been feverishly awaited by fans.
Atalanta pulled off
a stunning 4-1 victory – each goal met with shouts of glee, fans clutching at
each other in excitement.
Bergamo Mayor
Giorgio Gori told foreign journalists the match was “among the sad explanations”
for the high infection rate in the city and wider province.
“Some 40,000
Bergamo inhabitants went to Milan to watch the game. Others watched it from
their homes, in families, in groups, at the bar,” he said.
“It’s clear that
evening was a situation in which the virus was widely spread,” he added.
But Gori said he
didn’t think it was “the starting point”. Instead he believed Bergamo’s
troubles began when a patient at the Fenaroli Hospital in Alzano was admitted
with coronavirus but it went undetected, allowing him to infect others there.
Some 3,776 people
have died so far in Lombardy, out of a total of over 6,000 in Italy.
Gori said he thought
the statistics failed to represent the real toll on Bergamo and the surrounding
region because “there are certainly many elderly people who died at home,
without it having been possible to take them to hospital”.
“These people are
not included in the official statistics. No tests have been done on them either
before or after death”.