In the public safety world, they are known as LODDs -- line of duty deaths.
And now the biggest cause of those deaths in public safety jobs isn't from rushing into burning buildings or getting shot, it is from COVID-19. That's why researchers in the Triangle have developed a way to track coronavirus infections in the public safety group most likely to get them -- firefighters and emergency medical technicians.
And it's important to remember that while working, many of them live, eat, and sleep dormitory-style.
"You take people who have an increased number of exposures to at-risk individuals and members of the public through their occupational sort of goings-on, and then you put them in close proximity indoors to one another for extended periods of time," Robert Furberg told ABC11.
Furberg, a medical researcher for the Research Triangle Institute in Durham said if not a recipe for disaster, it's at least a recipe for spreading SARS-CoV-2.