-THE POSTED COORDINATES ARE FOR SUGGESTED PARKING ONLY. THE CACHE IS BETWEEN ZERO AND NINETEEN MILES AWAY FROM THE LISTED COORDINATES.-
Yikes! There’s been a confirmed case of a new disease in Central Jersey that the CDC suspects to be a novel form of the Cheese Touch. Little is known about this mysterious illness: it grows more foul and powerful by the day, and individuals infected with it can be contagious for up to ten days prior to showing any symptoms and are guaranteed to infect any other person they encounter that isn’t crossing their fingers at the moment of contact. Central Jersey’s Patient Zero has been confirmed as 22-year-old Rutgers University senior Agatha Christian. Your job, as noble volunteer citizens in pursuit of a better public health system, is to track the disease’s spread across New Jersey based on the following testimonies.
On May 11th, 2020, Agatha took a day trip to Bucks County, Pennsylvania; it’s likely that she tragically picked up the novel Cheese Touch while pumping her own gas at a Yardley gas station, as Pennsylvania has been riddled with filth and dairy for months. That evening, she returned home to the apartment she shares with her two roommates, Coraline Matthews and Caroline Smith. All three girls spent the next two days completing their coursework, as finals season at #RutgersOnline did not end until the evening of May 13th.
The day after her last exam, Coraline travelled down to spend three days with her girlfriend, Hurwaet Schneider (that’s her real name!), who lives in a studio apartment in Trenton. Caroline and Agatha, always cautious in the time of corona, #quarantined up a storm in her absence, but on the third day, Caroline needed to venture out to pick up some pipe cleaners from a local crafts store so that the girls could make mini coronavirus models to smash with plastic baseball bats for their Instagram stories. She kept careful distance from everyone else in the store, but on her way out, she ran into Scott WhateverHisLastNameIs, her absolute dreamboat of a TA from Intro to Biologically Considerate Oceanographic Research the previous fall, and absolutely had to hug him! Scott has been isolating perfectly, but also lives with two other people — Ken Boorns, a nature photography supersenior at Rutgers who has been #stayingathome, and Cordlandt Something, who works every Sunday through Thursday as a cashier at some kind of nameless regional combination coffee franchise and directly exchanges money with two hundred people every day.
That evening, Coraline came back to her own apartment, and the three girls spent the last few days before Agatha began showing Cheese Touch symptoms having a great time kvetching about COVID and reeling in the Instagram likes from the security of their own home. Two days after Coraline left, Hurwaet traveled up north to Woodbridge to have dinner with her sister, Barbarian “Barb” Hobgoblin Schneider and her parents, Keith and Mary Schneider. Barb is only seven and has been #homeschooling since the beginning of COVID under Keith’s strict and begrudging supervision, as his job as a software analyst allows him to work from home. However, Mary works Monday through Friday as a leasing agent for a local apartment complex and May is prime renting season! Although her afternoons are devoted to paperwork, she encounters fifteen people every morning while showing them apartments, and no arbitrary social distancing is going to stop her from demonstrating all of these exciting kitchen features!
Assuming that Agatha has been contagious for the entire ten-day latency period of her illness, and that no one in Central Jersey has been smart enough to cross their fingers, what is the minimum number of people that have been infected with the Cheese Touch as of the end of the day on May 21st? Input your answer in number format (i.e. “420”, NOT “four hundred and twenty”) into the checker to reveal the coordinates and information related to the hide.
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.