Jimmy Garoppolo and the San Francisco 49ers blew a 10-point fourth quarter lead to the Kansas City Chiefs with just over six minutes left in Super Bowl LIV last February.

According to a California doctor though, San Francisco’s inability to hold off Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs may have saved lives during the COVID-19 saga.

Dr. Bob Wachter of the University of California’s San Francisco medical department recently told the Wall Street Journal a 49ers Super Bowl victory could have saved numerous lives and prevented a further spread of coronavirus in the Bay Area.

“It may go down in the annals as being a brutal sports loss, but one that may have saved lives,” Wachter said.

Why did the 49ers losing limit COVID-19? Of course, whenever someone wins the Super Bowl there is going to be a Super Bowl parade, which would have drawn hundreds of thousands of people to the San Francisco area….just after an early case of COVID-19 had been detected.

There was a potential that the contagious coronavirus could have been spread throughout the area during the parade and in turn, possibly killing people as a result of a parade. Instead, the 49ers lost their 10-point lead and the Super Bowl in a stinging 31-20 defeat to the Chiefs.

Dr. Niraj Sehgal, also of the University of California’s San Francisco medical department, explained his thoughts of the parade being a big problem to the Wall Street Journal as well.

“It is certainly hard to imagine a more high-risk situation. It’s a date that I will never forget because the Super Bowl Sunday was actually the night that we stood up formally our command center. And the reason for that is another — again, it’s funny to call it a gift — the gift that we had two of the first patients in the country that required hospitalization.”

As of Tuesday, California had over 23,000 confirmed cases with 758 deaths. In contrast, New York has over 200,000 confirmed cases with over 10,000 deaths.

Therefore, while it is a little bit of a leap in logic, it’s quite easy to conceive a situation where those California numbers would look incredibly different if a Super Bowl parade happened in downtown San Francisco or anywhere else in the surrounding area.

Somehow, I have a feeling this will not be an easy thing to convince 49ers fans that a Super Bowl loss helped slow the tide of COVID-19.