For many months now, friend-of-the-site Amy Jane Gruber and I have had a little game going, wherein we try to come up with the dumbest ways someone could get infected with COVID-19. If you’re a healthcare worker who gets infected by a patient, that’s not embarrassing at all. If you’re having an extramarital affair and your mister or mistress gets you sick, well, that’s embarrassing.

Today, we have a new leader. Coming down with the virus from a cat’s birthday party is now the stupidest known way to get COVID. It’s so stupid it’s difficult to believe it’s even real. And yet:

“When I heard about this, I said … it’s a joke. Probably they said that to conceal something else—but it was exactly that,” Álvarez told local station Radio Bio-Bio, as translated by Google Translate. “We have corroborated it with at least six of the 15 [infected] people who told us the same thing.”

I like the idea that he thought they were covering up something else, with this story. What could be worse than this?