The Covid-19 epidemic has been with us for nearly a year, and I'm still having trouble understanding in simple terms just how contagious it is or isn't.
Lets say I have a 1 hour face-to-face conversation at a distance of 2 meters with someone with covid-19. To keep it simple we'll assume no face masks, and no physical contact. What are the odds of me catching Covid in that period? 0.1 percent? 1 percent? 10 percent? More? Less?
Or a different scenario - imagine 100 people in a room 100m by 100m randomly mingling (again, assume no masks and no physical contact). If one of those people has Covid-19, how many others are likely to have caught Covid after 1 hour?
I'm aware that there are many different factors in the spread of disease, age, health, behaviour etc but even so I amazed that I can find no real-world practical examples of just how likely I am to catch covid in different situations. I've seen a couple of statements describing things as 'low risk' or 'high risk' but never with numeric examples. For example spectating at a football match has been described as 'high risk' - but what does that mean? 1% chance of catching Covid? or 30% chance? Similarly visiting close family for 1 day over Xmas was described as 'low risk' but again no indication (in numbers) of what 'low' means.
Update - I'll admit I'm amazed by the apparent difficulty in answering this question (even with very approximate estimates), covid is currently the worlds number 1 problem, I would have expected this to have been computer modelled to hell and back by now, even if I can't get the answer to three decimal places, I'd have hoped to get an approximation to +-2%.
2nd Update - firstly, sorry if my tone upset anyone. Two more says of digging around and BrenBarns spreadsheet is the still the best/closest thing to an answer I've found. My request for a 'laypersons answer' is basically asking for something that a non-doctor or non-virologist can understand. As an engineer myself, I'm still looking for a science/math based answer, with some numbers attached, something a bit more explicit than just 'high risk' or 'low risk'