# What judgments/assumptions do you make about someone who catches coronavirus these days?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-judgments-assumptions-do-you-make-about-someone-who-catches-coronavirus-these-days/931390>\
**Category:** The Quarantine Zone\
**Tags:** covid-quarantine\
**Created:** [January 24, 2021, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-judgments-assumptions-do-you-make-about-someone-who-catches-coronavirus-these-days/931390 "2021-01-24T21:43:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 42

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**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\
**Post date:** [January 25, 2021, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-judgments-assumptions-do-you-make-about-someone-who-catches-coronavirus-these-days/931390/42 "2021-01-25T14:19:14Z")

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> [@FigNorton](#):
>
> Guess you don’t know many nurses? If you look through the “do you or anyone you know have covid” thread you’ll find a fair number who are on onboard with masks who got it.

You are correct, I do not personally know any nurses.

From my earlier post:

> [@Machine\_Elf](#):
>
> In the absence of _any_ information about how a person may have become infected, my predisposition is to strongly suspect that they let their guard down in one or more ways.

My predisposition does not mean “guilty for all time, incontrovertibly and without possibility of refutation.” It’s merely my default position, one which can change if/when new information is presented. I know there are essential workers out there whose exposures are much higher than average due to the nature of their jobs, and they surely get infected at a higher rate than work-at-home folks in spite of rigorous adherence to best practices. But how many of them are there?

> [@How are people getting COVID these days?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-people-getting-covid-these-days/920939):
>
> According to [this site](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102816/coronavirus-covid19-cases-number-us-americans-by-day/), the US is seeing about 35,000 new COVID diagnoses per day. How are people getting the virus? To be clear, I’m not asking the fundamental question “how is the coronavirus transmitted?” That seems to be pretty well understood at this point: spend time in the proximity of an infected person, and eventually they will exhale enough virus-filled droplets to share the bug with you. What I’m asking is this: what are the statistics regarding activities people were engaged in t…

I posted that back in September. the current 7-day average here in the US is 170,000 new cases of COVID every single day. Do we have a sense of how many of these cases are front-line workers who followed all the recommended safety practices, and how many of them were people who flew across the country to a big family Thanksgiving gathering that didn’t involve any masks?

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