It also depends on your definition of “know.” I have maybe 10 people I consider really close friends. Then, I have all the people in my family I am in regular contact with, which is about 30 people. Then, there are the members of the minyan at synagogue, whop are all people I think very fondly of, but not all of whom I know well enough to call friends. That’s about 30 more people. I know all the people I work with. That’s probably 40 people. If you add in the kids and their families, that’s about 400 more people. I could name on sight about 1/2 the members of my synagogue, but I don’t know in what sense I really “know” them. There are probably 30 people who work in the synagogue who are not part of the school system-- they are clergy, admin, or maintenance-- so I don’t think of them as “co-workers,” but they are people I in some sense “know.” There are probably 10 people in my building I say “hello” to by name. Maybe 25 people I would recognize out somewhere as people who live in the same complex, but I don’t know by name.
Then, there are all the people I “have known,” or people I know in former places or schools I keep up with a few times a month, but while they may have once been very close friends, are not now.
So it’s a lot of people, but what is the point? Would I “know” someone who had COVID-19 if the guy I friended on Facebook because his comments on my brothers posts always made me laugh, caught it? What if someone one the board had a confirmed case? Or does it have to be someone I have met face to face at least once? Or at least once in the last 10 years? I met the actress Gemma Jones face-to-face, once, and shook her hand. Do I know her?
Then, there are probably people who don’t disclose. If I absolutely definitely knew that my 3-day illness in Feb-March was COVID-19, and I could produce a negative test in writing, I’m not sure I’d go bragging about it. I’ll bet that for a while, at least, a cloud is going to linger over recovered people when they go out in public, to the point where it will not be to their advantage to disclose.
“Hey! Wear a mask, Dude!”
“Don’t need to; had it two months ago. Have immunity. Wanna see my test results?”
Other guy ducks and runs away.
Yeah, I’d wear the mask just to avoid questions.
You need to define your terms.
This reminds me of some math a friend of mine once did to figure out by what generation all Jews would be descended from at least one Holocaust survivor. It was some time around 2100. All actual Holocaust survivors by then would be dead. He predicted that by that time, Holocaust Remembrance Day would be much less solemn, and more of a holiday, like all the other “Yay! Someone tried to kill us but didn’t do it!” Holidays. To be perfectly honest (and my uncle married into a survivor family, and my favorite person in the world besides my husband and son is my aunt-by-marriage), I hope that does happen some day.
Anyone think that some day in the future, whatever date lockdown officially ends will be commemorated?