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Comment by krona | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK there still isn't a single documented case of outdoor transmission of the virus, anywhere in the world.

There's been a few cases reported, e.g. here in Germany there was a cluster of cases of a spread among members of extended family that only met outside reported. And for the vast majority of cases, we simply have no data.

Still, everything points to outdoors being massively safer, with the highest remaining risk if you stand still with someone infected for a long time. (And in many places masks have never been required outdoors, or only when in large groups of people)

If outdoors is that safe we shouldn't be having lockdowns and stay at home orders. We should be happy for people to be outdoors doing activities.

Also sports shouldn't have stopped at all having audience

> Officials in Haridwar said that on Monday and Tuesday alone they detected nearly 2,000 infections among festival goers.

https://www.dw.com/en/india-hindu-festival-turns-to-superspr...

A news report with the words "Experts say.." is noise. A case documented in a journal in a trial (e.g. DANMASK-19, or any of the dozens of other trials) is not an unreasonable standard of evidence in order to better determine what the true risk of outdoor transmission is.

How exactly would you confirm - beyond any doubt - that contagion happened outside? Most people live most of their lives inside a building of one sort or another, so it'd be almost impossible to 'document' a case of outside transmission.

The closest thing we have is homeless populations - they spend most of their time exclusively outside - and they still get sick: https://www.sfpublicpress.org/covid-19-cases-spike-among-hom...

So making some big claim about how outdoors transmission is impossible is kind of preposterous.

Even people from remote Amazon tribes in the jungle have got covid.

Also in warmer countries outdoor/indoor is not all that different ventilation wise. It is not like I am magically getting covid if I am standing just inside the door and am suddenly immune standing on the porch.

I can’t find the source, but early days of contact tracing I think there were some outdoor transmissions identified, but it was in the low single digits compared to tens of thousands identified indoors.

If you’re outside and whispering in someone’s ear or accidentally cough in their face, it sounds like transmission is possible from what I’ve heard.

But yeah the risks are super low.

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