Should People with Pneumonia Avoid Crowds?

By Lorra Garrick | Last updated 12/25

How safe, or harmful, is it for someone with pneumonia to be around crowds, and just what constitutes a “crowd”?

There are two kinds of pneumonia: community and hospital. Community is when the infection is contracted from microbes in the community.

Hospital refers to pneumonia contracted while being a patient at a hospital.

When my mother was diagnosed with pneumonia, the ER doctor told her it was “community,” and that it could have been contracted when she was standing next to a person in a store who coughed or sneezed.

My father thought nothing of wanting to take my mother out to breakfast so that she wouldn’t have to cook while she recovered from pneumonia.

Intuitively, I knew that this was a bad idea, because it’s easy to imagine, even without a microbiologist’s feedback, just how full of germs a restaurant is.

Imagine all the germs on the menus. The menus at restaurants, I have to believe, never get cleaned!

The menus must pass among thousands of hands over the course of one year, and you never know where those hands have been.

The tables get wiped down, but I’ve seen dirty-looking rags being used. I’ve never seen the seats getting wiped down.

And then of course, at a busy time, the restaurant is crowded.

So I talked my parents out of going out for breakfast to avoid any size crowd.

Several days after the pneumonia diagnosis, my mother had a follow-up with her primary care doctor.

The doctor told her to “avoid crowds of three or four people or more.”

The Danger to the Patient and to Others

“If the pneumonia is in the infectious stage, then coughing over or breathing near other people can expose those people to the infection,” says Dr. David Beatty, MD, a retired general practitioner with 30+ years of experience and an instructor of general medicine for 20+ years.

“The infectivity of the germ will vary, and how ill the exposed person becomes will vary,” continues Dr. Beatty.

“If we take COVID as an example. We know that one person can get the virus in the nose and throat and have no symptoms at all — while another person can become critically ill.

“The same is true of most of the other infective causes of pneumonia.”

Numerous microbes can cause pneumonia, including, of course, the 2021 coronavirus, Pneumococcal, Staph, Legionella, Haemophilus Influenzae, Streptococci, mumps, yeasts, fungi and parasites.

“Most of the causes mentioned above aren’t as infectious as COVID, and with bacterial infections they are more amenable to treatment with antibiotics.

“So people with pneumonia are a potential danger to others, although their contacts may or may not get the same severity of illness.”

Dr. Beatty also says that in today’s COVID-affected climate, people with any kind of pneumonia should avoid crowds or large groups.

“Someone who has a non-COVID pneumonia can still get a secondary COVID infection on top of the original infection.

“Given that the lungs are already damaged by the original infection, this will make it more likely to get additional respiratory problems from COVID.

“Obviously, exposure to crowds increases the chance of acquiring COVID or any other respiratory infection spread by droplet/aerosol transmission.

“If you have pneumonia avoid crowds.” This applies to those who’ve been vaccinated or who have never had COVID to their knowledge.