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, Kentucky state 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.”