Experts say ‘Game Zero’ match is why COVID-19 hit Italy’s Bergamo hard

It was the biggest soccer game in Atalanta’s history, and a third of Bergamo’s population made the short trip to Milan’s famed San Siro Stadium.

Nearly 2,500 fans of visiting Spanish club Valencia also traveled to that Champions League match.

More than a month later, experts are pointing to the Feb. 19 game as one of the biggest reasons why Bergamo has become one of the epicenters of the coronavirus pandemic — a “biological bomb” was the way one respiratory specialist put it — and why 35% of Valencia’s team became infected.

The match, which media have dubbed “Game Zero,” was held two days before Italy’s first case of locally transmitted COVID-19 was confirmed.

“We were mid-February, so we didn’t have the circumstances of what was happening,” Bergamo Mayor Giorgio Gori said this week during a live Facebook chat with the Foreign Press Association in Rome. “If it’s true what they’re saying that the virus was already circulating in Europe in January, then it’s very probable that 40,000 Bergamaschi in the stands of San Siro, altogether, exchanged the virus among them.

“Unfortunately, we couldn’t have known. No one knew the virus was already here,” the mayor added.

As of Tuesday, nearly 7,000 people in the province of Bergamo had tested positive for COVID-19, and more than 1,000 people had died from the virus — making Bergamo the most deadly province in all of Italy for the pandemic. The Valencia region had more than 2,600 people infected.