Atalanta 4 v 1 Valencia, 19th Feb, 2020.
This game in Milan really was a matter of life and death, say experts
How Atalanta v Valencia spread coronavirus in Italy and Spain
Seen this report in the (very short) Sports section of S.Times. (Not seen it posted on this mb).
It's the link between football and coronavirus.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/526a ... a7c0adb0fc
I've picked out a few key sentences.
"On February 19, they played the first European Cup knockout match of their 113-year history, hosting Valencia. A fairytale story: Atalanta operate on a budget that, in England’s economic hierarchy, would place them in the bottom half of the Championship.
Enzo Donina, 69,..... was an Atalanta player when they were promoted to Serie A in 1970, and more recently a club scout during the era when club’s excellent talent-spotting began to make Atalanta unusually profitable in the transfer market. Donina died on March 19 of a Covid-19-related illness. Barely had the club put together what they could to mark his passing, they were mourning Zacaria Cometti, the goalkeeper from their 1963 Coppa Italia victory. Cometti had the virus too, as did more than 2,290 people who have died in Bergamo, the European epicentre of Covid-19.
As hospitals buckle, and army vehicles roll in to export coffins the cemeteries no longer have space for, Bergamo seeks explanations for how and why it became “the Wuhan of Italy”. More and more diagnoses reach back to Atalanta 4 Valencia 1 on February 19.
“That match was a loudhailer for spreading the coronavirus infection,” believes Professor Francesco Le Foche, an immunologist in the infectious diseases centre at Rome’s Policlinico Umberto I. “A biological timebomb,” said mayor Gori
A vast cavalcade set off to Milan. Some 43,000 packed into buses and cars, and many of them spent part of the journey cheek by jowl on the Milan metro. About 2,300 travelled from Valencia. Those who flew into Orio al Serio airport recall that gowned medical staff took the temperatures of disembarking passengers. It was precautionary. Only three coronavirus cases had been registered in Italy by February 19.
In Valencia, meanwhile, the journalist and broadcaster Kike Mateu had taken ill. He had been at the game, and after making public the diagnosis, found himself dubbed Spain’s “Patient Zero”.
By the time Mateu was released from hospital after 25 days of treatment, Spain had more than 100,000 patients — people registered as infected — and the country’s terrible toll of fatalities was climbing, like Italy’s, towards 10,000.
“I believe that match played a significant part in spreading the virus,” Walter Ricciardi, the president of Italy’s National Health Institute, said. “A third of Bergamo’s population went to the stadium: it is not a coincidence if Bergamo is the city most affected, and if people in Valencia had a role in the spread of the virus in Spain.” More than one in three of Valencia’s playing and coaching staff have tested positive for the virus since the team returned from Milan.
So Atalanta 4 Valencia 1 remains set in its eerie aspic, at once the greatest night in a club’s history and a medical exhibit. It is, as the journalist Julian Burgos put it, “a match stigmatised for all time”. The stigma develops its own contagion. Liverpool-Atletico Madrid is under increasing scrutiny for having gone ahead fully three weeks after Atalanta-Valencia, in front of 54,000, including 3,000 Atletico fans who were by then barred from Liga games because Spain’s authorities had recognised the danger of infection in crowds. That Anfield night looks more and more conspicuous, the last big match that would not close its gates when everywhere else they were preparing to lock them.
This user liked this post: Zlatan