Some young people have been defying state social distancing guidelines, including a group in Kentucky who threw a “coronavirus party.” Now, at least one person who attended the gathering has tested positive.
During a press conference on Tuesday, Gov. Andy Beshear said that the partygoers first got together “thinking they were invincible,” and intentionally disregarded social distancing, CNN reports.
“This is the part where I, the person that tells everybody to be calm, have to remain calm myself," Beshear said. "Because anyone who goes to something like this may think that they are indestructible, but it’s someone else’s loved one that they are going to hurt.”
“We are battling for the health and even the lives of our parents and our grandparents," he added. "Don’t be so callous as to intentionally go to something and expose yourself to something that can kill other people. We ought to be much better than that.”
While data from China shows that COVID-19 is more deadly for people who are older than 60 and people who are immunocompromised, health officials have been urging young people to exercise social distancing, largely because that same data proves that people who are infected and asymptomatic can become carriers or "super-spreaders."
And that's not all. Young people in the U.S. seem more susceptible to the disease than in China. A report the CDC released earlier this month shows that up to 20% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 in the U.S. are between 20 and 44-years-old.
In New York State, 53 percent of the cases are people aged between 18 and 49. Meanwhile, California’s recently announced the first death of a patient younger than 18, and a 12-year-old in Georgia has been on a ventilator since Sunday.
“We all owe each other a duty to protect each other,” Beshear added. “And we simply can’t have folks that are doing things like this.”
