WWE managed to pull off WrestleMania 36 amidst the coronavirus pandemic back in early April, but not without scrapping a handful of matches due to wrestlers being placed in quarantine. The most notable example came near the top of the card when Roman Reigns opted out of his Universal Championship match with Goldberg over concerns that he might put his newborn twins at risk, forcing WWE to swap in Braun Strowman. However there was another championship match from the SmackDown brand that was nearly scrapped due to concerns over the virus as well. According to Brie Bella, her husband Daniel Bryan nearly missed his Intercontinental Championship match with Sami Zayn due to a) him having an autoimmune disease and b) her being pregnant with their second child.
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Bella expressed her concerns over Bryan’s safety back in late March just before the two-night show was taped.
“My husband’s still working, and he’s in Orlando right now,” Bella said on The Bellas Podcast. “And granted he’s working, he has a job, but it makes me really nervous. My husband has an autoimmune disease. He also fought asthma really bad when he was young. He was always sick when he was a kid. I’ll admit, I lost sleep last night. I’m grateful my husband is still employed, but at the same time, I’m really scared that he’s just out there. I just pray so much for him that he stays healthy.”
She then followed-up those comments on this week’s Sunday Night’s Main Event.
“We discussed [Bryan staying home] and especially because I’m pregnant, just the risk there,” Bryan said. “So we definitely talked about it but we were like, ‘Okay, if you don’t stay home and you go, how can we make this work?’ And that’s when we talked to our doctor. Because if our doctor was like, ‘No, no way. We can’t do this. It’s impossible,’ then we were going, ‘Bryan was going stay home,’ but our doctor gave us a lot of hope and was like, ‘It might be a little pricey but we can work on this. We can make it work.’ And so that’s when we were like, ‘Let’s do it then. It’s gonna take a lot of effort but it’s worth it.”
Bryan has competed in a number of matches at the WWE Performance Center since Mania, while Zayn has not appeared on television since. He was stripped of the Intercontinental Championship last week as a result.
