Public underweighted risk of COVID transmission when meeting others indoors

Risk of COVID-19 infection during social gatherings depends on multiple factors: how many people there are, how far apart they keep, whether they meet indoors or outdoors, the duration of the encounter, and so on. How people perceive this risk influences their behaviour, but accurately evaluating risk when multiple factors need to be integrated is difficult. In Summer 2020, we used a controlled experiment to estimate how the public evaluated the risk of COVID-19 infection in social settings. We compared their risk assessments to a sample of medical experts to identify gaps in understanding.