Hacker News Reader

> 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...

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com