Dynamite James
The Main attraction
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/flu-epidemic-hits-philadelphia
. Philadelphia Threw a WWI Parade That Gave Thousands of Onlookers the Flu | History | Smithsonian MagazinePicking up germs from a chance encounter with a stranger outdoors is theoretically possible, but infectious disease experts consider it unlikely.
None of this is to say that it’s advisable to get together with 27 of your friends in the closest park, sit in a tight circle, and chat unmasked for four hours. The initial concern about basketball games where sweaty, heavily breathing people are shoving and bouncing off each other for an extended period of time seems valid. But to the best of the available knowledge, there is little risk that a person behaving responsibly will become infected via someone briefly passing inside their 6-foot perimeter. And there’s decent evidence from the tuberculosis and flu studies that risky activities are less risky when done outside.
- “I would not worry about walking by someone,” Johns Hopkins infectious disease researcher Amesh Adalja told Slate’s Henry Grabar.
- A team of three medical doctors and biologists from Harvard wrote in the Washington Post that “outdoors, the virus quickly disperses in the air,” so the risk of becoming infected by someone running or walking past you is likely very low.
- Chinese researchers studied the air in public outdoor spaces in Wuhan and found “undetectable or very low” levels of virus outside.
- For other moderately contagious pathogens like tuberculosis, it’s now standard to recommend opening windows in hospital settings to reduce the spread of infection — again, dispersing the bacteria in a larger volume of air makes it much less likely that other people will get sick.
- By the same token, during the 1918 flu pandemic, experiments with open-air hospitals were highly successful at reducing the extent to which health care workers got infected.
- Another Chinese study looking at 318 outbreaks featuring three or more Covid-19 cases adding up to 1,245 total confirmed cases across more than 100 cities found just one instance of outdoor transmission.








It was more unsettling riding the subway which was ghost town, nyc subway is usually crush loaded on a Saturday with nice weather.