Yes, I know what you were saying, but you do at least know that the contaminated clothing and bedding came from a smallpox victim, so not hidden in the same sense as COVID-19 being hidden by the fact that it can transmit under cover from asymptomatic people, which could be around one infected person in three. As for needing to be more careful with covid-19, well we can hardly say for ANY potentially fatal infection that we should be more careful or less careful (or more careless) with one than with the other. Ethics, and all that. It's worth contemplating that the mortality rate (a term fraught with difficulty, though probably easier for smallpox as it is such an obvious and prominent infection when someone has it) for smallpox was around 30%, whereas for Covid-19 the mortality rate is in single numbers or less (fraught because we can't simply divide the number of confirmed cases by number of deaths, as many cases go unreported - mild symptoms or symptoms not recognised - or are asymptomatic). That is not in any way an argument for being either more careful or less careful. We must be as careful as it is humanly and practically possible to be. What we are arguing about here is the degree to which each step we take is either not enough, too much, or not required. As there's some evidence that transmission from hands or surfaces is possible (live virus has been harvested from those surfaces), sanitation is a no-brainer. Making every effort to keep your distance and to avoid crowded confined spaces, as we know that airborne is the main means of transmission, no-brainer. Taking the vaccine, far and away the best thing that everyone can do. Walking around with a damp rag on your face, that is infected if you're infected and doing very little if you're not, well I'm not sure about that. We'll never get rid of this virus so we have to decide how we are going to live with it for the rest of our lives. For the rest of our lives, right?