To expect people not to go out when ill even if it’s not covid.

[Annie2746]

Hi all, I know we can’t shut ourselves away every time we get a sniffle etc.

A good friend of mine told me this week that her teenage Dd had covid like symptoms - fever, cough, sore throat, fatigue etc. Got her a test and it came back negative which is great so on paper she doesn’t have to isolate anymore obviously.

Her daughter isn’t better yet (this was only a few days ago she got ill).

Yet she’s been mixing yesterday and today with others since negative result and gone shopping in a city today. Yet she didn’t go to school yesterday after negative results as she was still feeling poorly.

Aibu to think this is still a bit selfish? Putting covid aside, even before covid aibu to think this is selfish?

She could pass on whatever she’s got to someone else who maybe experience the same symptoms who will the ultimately have to have time off work whilst they tested!

If it was just a little cold I’d think whatever but what she got sounds nasty even if it’s not covid.

It just seems since covid all people seem
To take notice of is covid yet there’s so many other viruses going around that can be nasty too!

Nearly as annoying as to when parents send their kids into school with sickness bugs!

So is your issue that she should have stayed home to prevent passing on a virus with symptoms that are similar to Covid, and thus causing financial hardship as a result of others potentially having to isolate?

Or that she was too ill generally to be out, and should have stayed home to avoid transmitting a virus that made others ill?

Either way I think it’s unreasonable to be honest. you’re right in that it’s a stressful time and your situation sounds difficult, but bugs/viruses are an unavoidable part of life (despite megalomaniac Matt Hancock wanting to use test and trace to fight every single virus known to man).

False negatives are alarmingly common. She should have isolated until her symptoms stopped, regardless of the test result.

I've always thought there's a certain amount of common sense required on when to self-care with over the counter medicine and get on with life, vs when to stay home.
Sadly common sense seems to not be that common so you get some people who cry off work with a sniffle and others who almost pride themselves on socialising and going to work whilst coughing half a lung up.

Putting covid aside, even before covid aibu to think this is selfish?

Completely unreasonable to have expected, pre Covid, for people with what sounds like a cold to stay home.
I’m torn on it nowadays. People have to work and if they’ve had a negative test, plenty of employers won’t tolerate people being off with a continued sore throat/fatigue etc after a negative test. However I agree that unnecessary social mixing is potentially unreasonable, if someone with those symptoms met up with me, and I caught it and had symptoms, we’d have to keep DD home from nursery and that would make work very hard. So in that situation I would be annoyed, even if they knew it wasn’t Covid.
If I had symptoms, and had a negative test, I would warn anyone I was planning on seeing. A friend who was living alone and wfh might choose to still see me, a different friend with kids at school and a job that required leaving the house would probably decide not to.

Are you going to pay their bills to stay home?

She's a kid who wanted to go shopping. She doesn't have "bills to pay" and going shopping certainly won't help her pay them if she did.

Who's going to pay the bills of all the people who are forced to stay home because they've caught her flu and are waiting to see if it's Covid or not?

It's hardly rocket science. If you're infectious (with anything) then obviously you should do your best not to infect others, in the knowledge that infecting them with something with symptoms similar to Covid will cause them to have to stay inside and probably take time off work. That's just basic manners. Obviously people can't be expected to take time off work for a cold, but if you're actively infectious there's no reason you need to be traipsing around a mall unless you work there or need to buy food or other essentials. We we should all be avoiding unnecessary outings anyway right now.

Do people really not understand the difference between "maybe hanging out at a busy mall isn't the best idea when you're sick" and "lock yourself into your house and don't leave at any costs!!!"?

Retail workers HATE people going shopping while they're sick, even before the pandemic that was a selfish and spoiled thing to do.

It's really crappy that shop workers on on minimum wage might have to take time off work unpaid while they wait to be tested, just because Princess can't bear to spend a single day away from the mall.

I have found this discussion so surprising. I’m Australian and we have had public health campaigns this year telling people it’s time to stop the “soldier on” mentality and that we have a community responsibility to stay home when sick. Most workplaces will send you home if you have symptoms and don’t want you back until you have a negative Covid test AND no symptoms. Same for kids at school. I had to keep my teenage kids off school with very mild symptoms because otherwise the school would have been calling me to pick them up as soon as they coughed or sneezed.

I got one bad cold this year and I did stay inside. Otherwise every person I passed it on to would have to stay home, get a covid test, self isolate, etc.

Insecure work without guaranteed sick pay was identified as a risk factor in the spread of Covid and while there were some payments provided I don’t think they dealt with that issue well enough.

Do people really not understand the difference between "maybe hanging out at a busy mall isn't the best idea when you're sick" and "lock yourself into your house and don't leave at any costs!!!"?
I think quite a few people selectively pretend that they're the same thing when it allows them to stick the boot into an OP.

@Myshinynewname

Maybe you don't stay at home with flu but I would. I was really hoping that covid might make people think a bit more about how their actions when ill affect the people around them.

You would have no choice BUT to stay home with flu. Flu is not like a bad cold. It knocks you sidewards and you can barely make it out of bed to crawl to the loo.

I agree, proper flu is horrendous. What I have now isn't flu, I'm still well enough to work even though I feel ill, but I'm still staying at home because I don't need to go out.

I wish people with any kind of infectious disease would stop going out and infecting the rest of us. That’s what I’m hoping will be a silver lining of the pandemic.

Re: the sniffles. I caught whooping cough on the train a few years ago. The first two weeks you have flu symptoms, then you struggle to breathe for up to 3 months. If the person who gave it to me had thought “Better not take the train today, I might give other people my cold”, then I and goodness knows now many others would not have needed to suffer as a result.

*You have cold symptoms, sorry

People have lost their minds. So according to pattypan we now shouldn’t get public transport if we think we have a cold in case it develops into something serious? What about if we need public transport to get to work and our job is either an essential one or one which does not offer sick pay/WFH?

Viruses are a part of life. We have been unable to stop thousands of new Covid cases every day despite spending billions and using lockdowns/restrictions/test and trace. What on earth makes people think that any of this is sustainable long term?

It isn’t about sticking the boot in, it’s about the OPs attitude being the thin end of pattypan’s wedge.

@PattyPan My child went to school with whooping cough for three weeks before it was diagnosed, thought it was a cold. He likely caught it from another child at school but I still don't think anyone should be expected to stay home with a cold. Children can get multiple colds a year!

Our youngest (13) has been carrying on as normal with a cold and a tonsil the size of a ping pong ball, it's the same shit different year for what he's got as far as he's concerned.

The country has gone bonkers. Fart the wrong way and you've got covid. "Selfish" has become the most overused word of 2020, with "murderer" bringing up the rear.

If the person who gave it to me had thought “Better not take the train today, I might give other people my cold”, then I and goodness knows now many others would not have needed to suffer as a result
The world can't stop each time someone gets the sniffles!
Plus you have no idea if you caught it on the train, you'll have been at the station at either end, ticket barriers, anywhere you went at your destination, anywhere you went before your journey (unless you really did live only in your house for weeks and then took a train journey to a destination but didn't go anywhere).

I'm always amazed when I hear people who have the superpower to know at a distance which cough or breath from a stranger had the exact same virus/bacteria in it to make them unwell.

The thing that struck me was someone unwell enough to miss school yet going out. Just wrong.

I've noticed I've not seen any ill people out and about recently actually... No colds, sniffles! No sneezing and very few coughs.... Usually at this time of year I'm in high alert dodging them!

My point is that if people don’t go out while they’re infectious, they won’t spread their illness around and there will be less illness overall. So people wouldn’t get colds as often if we all stayed at home with a cold, not to mention recovering more quickly if we actually rested.
Sick people staying off rather than infecting everyone else improves overall productivity in the workplace, so essential employers should be in favour. Obviously I think all jobs should offer sick pay, I’m not a sadist.

@LolaSmiles sure, I am guessing that’s where I caught it. I took the train from my university where no one had it to London for a job interview and caught it as part of that experience. The interviewer didn’t have it so presumably it was the transport section of the day.
However, it’s a horrible illness and my world did have to stop even though I was in my final term of university because I couldn’t breathe, or get out of bed to go to lectures/library for weeks. Even in my final exams I was still stifling whooping.
I was a fit and healthy young person who had been vaccinated - it could have killed an immunocompromised person. When I have a cold I think about how it is mild for me but develop into something serious for someone more vulnerable.

OP- I agree with you. You’re not saying that every tiny sniffle should result in people locking themselves in a room. You are saying that people who have illnesses that have made them ill enough to take the day off, run a temperature and feel pretty awful should do what they can to avoid spreading it around right now. Not least because the people that they might spread it to may be forced to isolate right now and miss out on paid work in the immediate lead-up to Christmas. That’s totally reasonable and I think it would not be a bad thing if society became more conscious of spreading germs and illnesses around.
It also really frustrates me to see people trotting out the “if yet was flu she wouldn’t be able to leave the house” line. It’s just nonsense. The only way to really know the difference between flu and a cold is to test, which is just not practical. The reason flu spreads so widely and effectively is because lots of the people infected with it only ever get mild cold-like symptoms. During the swine flu outbreak lots of the people who tested positive had very mild symptoms, I know a few people who would never have known it was anything other than a cold if they hadn’t been tested As a general rule a fever is much more common in flu than a cold but that is not a hard and fast rule.

@PattyPan life isn't that simple. You don't know why they needed to be on the train. Some people cannot afford to take time off work for a cold.

You don't know why they needed to be on the train. Some people cannot afford to take time off work for a cold.
Exactly.

PattyPan
Your world stopped because you were ill. It's not a proportionate response to expect everyone's lives to stop when they have the sniffles because you got ill following a journey across the country to the capital.

Did you sit your exams at home with an invigilator? If not did you manage to prevent any cough leaving your body during the time between leaving your house, going to uni, sitting the exam and going home? It's quite common for people to get bugs on top of existing bugs so do you know that you weren't breathing your germs onto people? If you weren't at home and can guarantee that you didn't breathe or cough when you left the house then, to use your claims, how do you know you haven't risked killing an immunosuppressive person?
Suddenly the stay at home if you have the sniffles otherwise you might be killing people argument looks a little silly.

@LolaSmiles whooping cough is only infectious for the two weeks of cold symptoms. Once you’re whooping, you’re not infectious any more. So I was able to sit my exams in the usual place. Yes, we can all be carrying various germs at any given moment without symptoms and no one can help that. But going about your normal business when you know you have an infectious illness is a bit of a dick move.

What I said in my original post was about the silver lining of the pandemic - what I meant by that was lessons learnt as a society. I want us to move to a place where people can afford to take time off when they are ill, because that’s the best thing for us all.

I would love not to have to go to work whilst feeling ill. But life doesn’t work like that.

Going about your normal business when ill isn't a dick move if you can't afford to take time off work. It's not the individual's fault, it's the government who don't pay enough sick pay for people to live on.

Yes, we can all be carrying various germs at any given moment without symptoms and no one can help that. But going about your normal business when you know you have an infectious illness is a bit of a dick move.
I see so you were ok to go about your business and take your exams because you 'knew' any potential urge to cough was whooping cough / if you had any other germs then you weren't to know so it's totally fine for you to do what you wanted, but anyone who has the sniffles should stay at home even if they are reasonably sure it's a cold because that might kill people?

Totally logical.

I want us to move to a place where people can afford to take time off when they are ill, because that’s the best thing for us all
I would agree with you, if you weren't trying to argue that a cold is the threshold for being ill enough to be locked in your home.

Is it really the best thing for everyone for people to stay off work with a common cold?
Would you be saying that if:
You've waited 5 months for a dentist appointments but unfortunately the sniffles have gone round the surgery so theyve had to cancel appointments or close?
Your child's teacher is absent 50% of the autumn term because a cold might not be a cold and could kill?
You're waiting to close on a house sale, but the whole chain is on hold for a week because one person's solicitor is currently at home due to a sore throat and stuffy nose?
You have to take time off work when your children's childcare has to close due to staff having colds?

Our of interest just how much of your life are you happy to be on pause each time someone has a cold?