To ask regarding COVID - what does 'we just have to live with it' look like in real life?

[Fay2121]

I keep hearing the phrase.

What is the reality of 'we just have to live with it'.

@BiggerBoat1

Try working in a school and then say we're living with it effectively. It is chaos. So many teachers off unwell that we are again having to send year groups home.

So - if they were the same degree of "unwell" with a common cold would they be at work?

Or is it just because they have taken a test which gave them a red line and policy states they need to stay at home until they don't have a red line?

because of a lack of willingness to take any of the simple measures available to reduce transmission.

But what would they be? That have been proven by the data to reduce transmission of omicron?

Or is it just because they have taken a test which gave them a red line and policy states they need to stay at home until they don't have a red line?

Current policy for children at our school is now that they only stay off for three days following a positive test.

I’m baffled that everyone is testing tbh

For me - just awful. I never want to live with it again.

My DM has been diagnosed with COVID delirium - tested positive after 5 days.

She's soiling herself.

She is up in the night fully dressed, coat, shoes, handbag - ready to go out.

We've hidden the car keys to stop her driving.

She doesn't always know who we are. She's very forgetful.

She is grey, pale and coughing. Struggling to eat.

She's ringing friends at 4am for a chat

She keeps pulling all of the phones out of the wall and piling them up in the centre of one room.

There's frozen ( or rather now thawed) food in the cold oven.

She is so ill I could cry.

We are working shifts to stay with her four hours away because the care company we were referred to are short staffed due to COVID and can't help.

Living a nightmare this last 9 days.

Praying she recovers.

They will be absent because they have tested positive and policy says not to work. They may not actually be ill.

I work in a school which still has the policy of staff and students isolating, so still have staffing issues on occasion. The majority of staff aren't actually ill.

We are in a weird no man's land of no mandated quarantine, but lots of places saying you should, but no tests.

This will start to slow as tests are fewer and further between.

My reality is still virtually isolating, as I’m caring for DM who was diagnosed with a lymphoma in December. Testing at my own expense now, due to 2 children in different schools. Cancelled theatre tickets bought 12 months ago today - took out insurance, but suddenly becoming the carer of someone who has suddenly become CEV isn’t covered.

My OH works in a supermarket, he was expected to go in despite having a positive PCR.

We used to use the "Bradford Factor" to calculate absences. One too many and you were in front of HR. Being told that "most people come to work with a cold" and it was no reason to stay off. One bloke who was off for treatment for cancer was unfairly selected for redundancy through this. (He was paid redundancy. He then sued them and got another payout. And he recovered).

So do we go to work with a cold or not? Nobody here is. I am on my own in the office today.

So do the security staff who aren’t in actually feel unwell enough not to be at work or are they being told to stay home until the test is negative.

If it’s the former then businesses will have to stop having as few people employed as possible so there’s some slack.

If it’s the latter then get them back in

@MajorCarolDanvers what if there are no supply teachers available? Your child is taught by an unqualified TA and this is really unsettling fir the increasingly anxious children who lack resilience as a result of various factors.

The huge majority of teachers will go to school when horribly unwell because we CARE about the children. This was me last week. I went to school for 11 hours a day, did the biz then got home and flopped, unable to give anything more to my own children. They were fed, had clean clothes and had good bedtime routine but I didn't hear them read every day and I was stressed out most days.

It's getting milder each mutation. We have excellent vaccines available for free. I think the antiviral drugs need to be more easy to access for our vulnerable people, but aside from that, it's a virus that is here to stay. We need to stop being terrified. Humans get sick and die. It's part of life and it sucks, but that is reality. Get used to it.

My reality is:

1. Everyone I know who has had it, has been better within a few days.
2. I haven’t had it.
3. Life is back to normal.

I just listened to an inerview on R4 where the owener of a small business was explaining that staff who cant' WFH and only have mild symptoms are allowed to come in, (by car) work alone in a room and go home. If they are really ill they stay off as you would with anything else and those that do admin jobs can WFH but 2 years in they simply can't operate with everyone being off for 5-7 days with mild symptoms that in the absence of free testing, might not even be Covid and even if it is, need to get on with it with mitigations in place. The interviewer was shocked and tried to suggest she shouldn't be allowing it but she stood her ground - I was quite impressed. I think too many white collar middle class job types really get that lots of jobs CAN'T be done from home, not everyone gets sick pay and lots of small business simply can't absorb the loss of productivity. Its not about them being good employers - they'll be shit employers if they go bust.

@ValerieCupcake

We used to use the "Bradford Factor" to calculate absences. One too many and you were in front of HR. Being told that "most people come to work with a cold" and it was no reason to stay off. One bloke who was off for treatment for cancer was unfairly selected for redundancy through this. (He was paid redundancy. He then sued them and got another payout. And he recovered).

So do we go to work with a cold or not? Nobody here is. I am on my own in the office today.

Completely right - fact he recovered is irrelevant.

I think it’s interesting how the ‘it’s just like flu’ at peak corona mitigations has turned into ‘it’s just a cold’ now.

For some that’s true, always has been, but with vaccinations and a milder variant it’s much more akin to flu now meaning that obviously more people will be off school/work.

My dd and I have just had it. I felt rotten for about a week and am left with a fatigue that I suspect will be helped by a bit of a health kick to my diet for a while. My dd (6) was quite poorly for about four days, deathly pale, tired with stomach pains/diarrhoea and has been left without a sense of smell and lingering diarrhoea for about a week. It’s quite concerning from a hydration and nutrition pov never mind the physical discomfort and unpleasantness of it all. From our perspective this was a very unpleasant flu, one that’s in very high circulation at the moment.

Life is back to normal, except if your performance related pay is going to be restricted because some of your class had covid at most points during the year, your TA who normally does interventions with the lowest attaining children in your class has been poached for cover elsewhere in the school, the standards set are massively unattainable, half your class never read at home and most of the children are zombified from 5 hours a day playing Roblox age 5. And talk in an American accent.

Great! Dock my pay, I'm clearly not deserving of my measly teachers' salary.

Basically we have to get used to the idea of being sick (and the associated disruption this will cause e.g. continued pressure on the NHS, school closures) every few months.

Brilliant. All the WFH adults are now up in arms at having to go vaccine to the office. Show me any other profession where one (hopefully two) calcined adults are in close contact with 30 unvaccinated individuals all day. Get the fuck on with it, like we have for the last 2 years whilst being painted as lazy shites by the mainstream media. You have no fucking idea

@BiggerBoat1

Try working in a school and then say we're living with it effectively. It is chaos. So many teachers off unwell that we are again having to send year groups home.

Just going to say this, our small school (550 students and 63 staff) we have 6 members of staff off, including me. I’m trying to manage cover organisation from home. No supply teachers for love nor money (even the really crap ones that we’d said we would never have back ever) Departments down to one person. Kids though have packed in testing, so it’s spreading and spreading.

There is living with it badly - what the UK is doing now.

There is living with it better - more ventilation and other mitigations. I for one am fine with having masks in NHS settings for the foreseeable, because medical staff need to be working and vulnerable people need to avoid it if possible.

Looking forwards it is hard to say, we all hope the next variants are milder, we have to be alert - so I would also keep community surveillance (the ONS study).

We have excellent vaccines available for free

They’re not free, we’ve funded them.

On that point I’d be happy to pay (extra) for a covid vaccine but this isn’t an option. I certainly would have paid to get dd vaccinated when they were first approved instead of catching it at this point and not being able to access a vaccine for twelve weeks. I’m pissed off that we managed to keep her safe from covid despite her being part of the key worker kids cohort through all three lockdowns and the vaccine was approved for her age group ages ago yet all restrictions were lifted before the government even offered the option of booking her age group. It might not have helped but we’ll never know now.

@Sharrowgirl

You catch a virus, you feel a bit ill for a few days and when you feel better you go back to school or work. Like you did all your life, prior to 2020.

I wish it was a bit ill for a few days, for the great majority it’s much worse than that

@beattieedny

It's getting milder each mutation. We have excellent vaccines available for free. I think the antiviral drugs need to be more easy to access for our vulnerable people, but aside from that, it's a virus that is here to stay. We need to stop being terrified. Humans get sick and die. It's part of life and it sucks, but that is reality. Get used to it.

I understood that whilst omicron was thought to be milder than delta, it wasn’t milder than the original variant.

At the school where I work it's starting to looks a lot like it did at the height of covid, except with no masks, open windows or testing. So many staff are off with it at the moment, some of them for the second time and almost all fully vaccinated but quite a few are feeling really unwell. Kids with EHCP's are not getting the support they need because half the TA team have been wiped out. Training, trips and other events are being cancelled because every available member of staff is needed to cover lessons. Supply Teachers and agency TA's are getting thin on the ground.
Outside of work, everything feels normal as we can socialise, kids activities are back on and we're able to visit people. Most of my friends and family are still working from home though.