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That article is totally misleading. Obviously they meant it to be.
You don't have "indirect contact" with 286 people. Each person may have had direct or indirect contact with, say, 10. The ONLY POSSIBLE WAY you may have had
indirect contact" with 286 people is in this phenominally unlikely instance:
Person 1 has sex with person 2. Person 2 has sex with person 3. 3 with 4, 4 with 5, etc. Finally person 284 has sex with person 285. YOU have sex with person 286. You probably have herpes, gonorhea, syphilis, whatever else the other 286 people have.
That's assuming every person also only has sex with ONE person, then gives up on it. It is the only way it works because of the chronological nature of it. Example: Person 1 has sex with person 2. 1 has sex with 3. 3 never has sex again. 2 goes on to fuck 4 and so on, up through the end of the chain. All of a sudden, one less person If 3 had sex with other people who didn't rejoin the chain at some point, which the article indicates, the number all of a sudden gets much smaller. So, as you can see, the 286 number is clearly far too high.
Much more likely, each person has sexual contact with, say, 4 people. Which means that in PRECISELY THE RIGHT SET OF CHRONOLIGICAL AND SEXUAL CIRCUMSTANCES, you might have had indirect contact with a quarter of that number. Again, this is extremely unlikely.
Furthermore, if any one couple used protection, the chain is broken (for the purposes of this article). Oops, forgot to mention that, didn't we? But I digress.
But the CHAIN ends up getting up to 288 people. I declare shenanigans on the statisticians who compiled this data, because they're clearly just rabble-rousing.
I'm not against having safe sex. I agree with the idea that you're basically having sex with everyone your partner has had sex with, as far as diseases go. I am, however, against the extremely slanted presentation of the numbers. That's all.
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