The man leading Mississippi’s public health agency says state research shows that 8 out of 10 recent COVID-19 coronavirus cases in the state came from social gatherings.

“If we look at how do people get it, pretty clearly there are some common threads that we’ve identified,” Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said Monday. “The most common thing that we’ve seen, about 80 percent of the time, it was a social gathering where people let their guard down.”

“It might be a funeral, it might be an extended family get together, you’re not going to wear a mask around your cousin who comes in from out of town,” he said. “It’s going to be with nephews, it’s going to be going to maybe a close friend’s birthday party. Those sort of things is what we’re seeing.”

“The social gatherings really do seem to be getting us,” Dobbs said. “It’s the social gatherings where we let our guards down and we feel like ahh, it’s appropriate for me to be more personal, to breathe other people’s air, to touch other people.”

Dobbs said people need to treat anyone outside of their immediate family as if they have the virus, because the person may be infected and not know it.

“Please just be very careful right now,” he said. “If you’re around other people, there’s a really good chance that one of those folks has coronavirus.”