And here is the reason Bergamo has been decimated.A soccer game.
"And in Italy, the February 19th soccer
game between Atalanta and Valencia at Milan’s San Siro stadium may go down as one of the biggest SSEs in modern history. More than a third of Valencia’s team members became infected that day, as did an uncountable number of the many Bergamo residents who attended to cheer on Atalanta. (Of the notable COVID-19 SSEs that I have seen described in the media and scientific literature, this soccer game is the only one where attendees were even partially exposed to the open air. However, the roof of San Siro covers all seated areas, and the
46,000 attendees would have been closely packed.)
There’s an ironic and tragic back story to that soccer game. The Atalanta side, known more formally as Atalanta Bergamasca Calcio, is based in Bergamo. Having qualified for the UEFA Champions League for the first time in the small-market team’s history, Atalanta became subject to UEFA regulations, which
required that they play in a venue larger than their 21,000-capacity home stadium in Bergamo. This is how the team ended up playing—and winning—at Milan’s San Siro on February 19th. We now know how this story ends for Bergamo. But at the time, it stood as one of the
greatest “fairy tale” moments in the small city’s history, which is why 40,000 Bergamaschi, a third of its population, ended up in San Siro that day, with shops being closed and kids taken out of school. That incredible series of sporting events—leading to the improbable spectacle of a small-market team playing in a nearby big-market stadium—is what allowed 33 percent of Bergamo to turn one building into a giant petri dish, the statistical equivalent of three million New Yorkers sitting cheek-by-jowl to watch a Yankees game."
On an annualized basis, the last three weeks in Lombardy correspond to a regional per-capita death rate of 0.72 percent—or, put another way, the death of one person out of every 140 residents.
quillette.com
