The night of March 6 was supposed to be one of the most exciting for high school basketball fans in Indiana.
About 2,800 fans packed the gym at Lawrence Central High School in Indianapolis for the sectional semi-finals.
Little did anyone know that five people in the gym that night would later die from health complications caused by the coronavirus,
At least a dozen others who were there have tested positive or experienced symptoms consistent with the virus.
“The problem with any communal event like a basketball tournament is that you’ve got a clustering of people in close proximity,” said Dr. Cole Beeler, infectious diseases doctor at Indiana University Health, told the Star.
Paul Loggan, 57 and Roscoe Taylor, 43, were there, cheering teams on.
So was Charles Johnson, 78, three rows up behind the Warren Central bench and next to his wife, Kay.
Larry Rush, 67, was there, too, in the Lawrence North High School section, one of the “Four Horsemen” of Wildcat fans.
Jim DeSalle, 70, sat for the second game, near the Lawrence North bench.
Within weeks, those five men would be dead from coronavirus-related conditions.
“The sad thing looking back,” said Kay Johnson, the widow of Charles Johnson, “is that we didn’t know.”
It seems clear now that the coronavirus was already spreading during the sectional week that started on March 3 and probably even before.
On March 11, when Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for coronavirus and the NBA subsequently suspended its season, the reality of how serious the disease is and how quickly it can spread became real for many people in the sports world.
“We have a good idea of how this virus spreads,” Beeler, said. “We think it spreads by large droplets that are passed out of the mouth when people are breathing or talking or shouting. It’s infectious around a 6-foot radius.
“The thing that’s scary about this virus is that you can infect someone and not have any symptoms yourself. It may have been that there was someone there, or a few people there, that were infected and didn’t even know they were infected.”
It is possible, even likely, that all of the extra precautions that week would not have mattered because of the nature of a sectional tournament, too, he said.
“You’ve got a bunch of people sitting close to each other,” Dr. Beeler added. “The other thing is that people are probably yelling and screaming and cheering on their teams. We know you’re probably kicking out a lot more droplets as you talk and scream than you would if you are just breathing or talking in a normal voice.”
He said some studies have suggested that loud talking and singing might spread droplets even further.
“It would make it a pretty fertile territory for spreading infection.”
Hindsight is 20/20 he said.