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'.

Just live with it, if you've got COVID, go about life as normal, go to work unless of course you feel awful, go shopping, attend appointments..etc

Faye2121- unfortunately, given our experience recently, I have to agree with your comment about empathy. There's very little empathy for people who have been badly effected, and I think a lot of it is down to the management of the pandemic by the government and how the media report on it.

So many misleading articles and reports are published daily, and the non reporting of long covid and how research is showing longer health issues is shocking.

It's a poorer society that we are creating I feel. One where people just seem to be bothered about themselves.

I'm behaving exactly as I did in February 2020. Birthday parties for my kids, seeing family and friends, going on day trips and taking the kids to the zoo, soft play, swimming, play parks. Going to the shops for non essentials without feeling guilty. Its great.

@MajorCarolDanvers Right so when I sat up in bed and cried last week because I was too ill to come to work I should have phoned in sick rather than hauling myself into work, crying at my desk, struggling all day for 11 hours and going home to ignore my kids all evening, doing no housework and falling out with my husband because it wasn't flu. Don't split hairs please. I was fucking ill. I should have stayed at home in bed. I wasn't safe to look after 30 needy, disadvantaged 4 year olds with no TA in an environment they aren't ready for whilst being observed by SLT. I should have stayed at home whilst they were split between classes taught by a TA who doesn't know them. No interventions would happen. No speech therapy. No crucial conversations with their carers.

But no, keep telling me what I should have done differently whilst being grateful it wasn't YOUR child being shortchanged by a broken system. Be thankful people like me turn up for work and try our best because without us there would be nothing for your kids.

@AnxiousSquirrel

Just live with it, if you've got COVID, go about life as normal, go to work unless of course you feel awful, go shopping, attend appointments..etc

See I don't get that.

Go about life as normal....

but not if the airlines have taken off flights and I'm stuck in the airport rather than sunny Spain, not if there are huge waiting lists for medical treatments, not if the supermarket has no staff...isn't that more 'stick my head in the sand and pretend it isn't happening'.

Yup. The people who want to live with it are the first to complain that their public transport is cancelled, no GP appointments, their child is put into another class or taught by an unqualified teacher, the supermarket shelves are empty. Selfish.

@DockOTheBay

I'm behaving exactly as I did in February 2020. Birthday parties for my kids, seeing family and friends, going on day trips and taking the kids to the zoo, soft play, swimming, play parks. Going to the shops for non essentials without feeling guilty. Its great.

At the minute....but not if you catch COVID and are too ill to carry on.

Not if the play centre has no staff or the supermarket has no staff, or if your kids friends are all ill ...you can't carry on behaving exactly as you did in February 20 because you need other 'well' people to make that happen.

How are services going to catch up, when staffing shortages are such an issue

Quite simply they’re not going to. The governments plan for the NHS absorbing covid and ‘catching up’ have been deafening in their silence.

So long as covid and vaccinations remain manageable this narrative will eventually be absorbed into the pre-existing 2019 one where we already had waiting lists and shoddy to failing services and we’re all going to pretend that covid has had no impact on staffing and beds. Well until someone points it out and then they’ll be shouted down with vaccine roll out and told that it’s really, really hard being in government during a crisis.

It's a poorer society that we are creating I feel. One where people just seem to be bothered about themselves.

Yep @Sundown12 - we were definitely right with lack of empathy. ☹️

@Invasionofthegutsnatchers Right so when I sat up in bed and cried last week because I was too ill to come to work I should have phoned in sick rather than hauling myself into work

Ehhh... Yes? Too ill to come into work means too ill to come into work. There are no prizes for martyring yourself.

yes, it doesn't seem like we will ever just live with it.
my Dc's school on the back of no more tests have sent out a communication to say we can't send our children to school with ANY symptom of a respiratory tract infection, if they develop a symptom while they are in school parents will be called to come and collect with the child is supervised at a distance. Sounds reasonable until I read the list of symptoms ....
a cough – you may bring up mucus (phlegm)
sneezing
a stuffy or runny nose
a sore throat
headaches
muscle aches
breathlessness, tight chest or wheezing
a high temperature
feeling generally unwell

my DC was sent home today and isn't to return until they are well enough to attend... they have a runny nose and a bit stuffy, no temp and other wise maybe a very occasional cough.

I work in social care so I still have tests, DC is negative so I called the school to tell them she barely has a common cold and the office staff just kept repeating my dc can't return until well again when I said she's fine.

@WeddingFavour tell that to the parents demanding where I am or SLT in my performance management review denying me pay progression because my class haven't made sufficient progress.

If you don't teach you don't get it

@Invasionofthegutsnatchers

Teachers with no access to LFTs unless they pay for them out of their own pockets, coming to work with a temperature and flu symptoms, battling through 10-12 hours of a highly stressful day because apparently it doesn't spread in schools, only hospitals and prisons

But if you aren't fit to work you aren't fit to work whether that us a cold/flu/bug/covid etc. If you are fit to work then it is as always, you don't carry out tests to identify the infection usually, you make the call as to your fitness to work not based on which infection it is.

See I don't get that.

Go about life as normal....

but not if the airlines have taken off flights and I'm stuck in the airport rather than sunny Spain, not if there are huge waiting lists for medical treatments, not if the supermarket has no staff...isn't that more 'stick my head in the sand and pretend it isn't happening'.

What would you normally do if flights get cancelled or the supermarket is short staffed? Do that

If you were that ill of course you shouldn't have been in work. Whether or not it was covid, it would be selfish to pass that bug on to other families. And I don't know any teachers who are expected to work from home when ill. You'd have been sent home from any if the schools I have worked in.

We need to get out of no man's land. A lot of the hold ups in services etc is people who are not actually ill, but positive. So either they're ill enough to be off, or not.

I give up. You do not understand

@RiojaRose

I suspect what will happen is that people who were asymptomatic the first time, or who had mild symptoms, will have scarier experiences the third, fourth or fifth time they get it. By then the NHS will have been either overwhelmed or privatised so many people won’t have had boosters, and their treatment won’t be covered by insurance. We will encounter covid mutations that are much worse, because there’s no reason to think that mutations will always be milder. And lots of people who thought they were immune or were quite happy to live with it will end up with long covid, unable to work, unable to pay their mortgages; their houses and cars repossessed; with nothing but the memories of the foreign holidays they used to enjoy.

That’s what I think living with it will probably lead to.

That's just not the way viruses work though

I called the school to tell them she barely has a common cold and the office staff just kept repeating my dc can't return until well again when I said she's fine.

There's no way they can sustain excluding children for a stuffy nose, some kids will never actually be in school. A few calls to the LEA and that policy will be dust pretty quick.

That's just not the way viruses work though

That poster would be a dab hand at disaster fiction though.

With four children, lft that dont show positive for about a week after symptoms and no access to pcrs tests? It means carrying on as normal when your kid gets a new cough. I test with a LFT on day 1 but class teacher said LFT dont show positive straight away so possibly going out and about at some stage positive and no way to tell as feeling fine. I'm sure my daughter had it but still negative on LFT on day four so I stopped testing. That's what it looks like. Community spread.

@MajorCarolDanvers

flu like virus

Flu means you can't get out of bed. And if that unwell stay at home and stop spreading it to other people.

Please.

No it doesn't. You can have asymptomatic flu. For obvious reasons it's hard to assess exactly how common this is, but some of the research suggests well over 20% of cases. Given that we so seldom test and they're not ill, these people are all out spreading it as they go about their daily lives. Not all the ones with symptoms are necessarily unable to get out of bed either. I don't generally think getting bogged down in comparisons between Covid 19 and flu is helpful, but where they are similar is that people who are infected can be completely asymptomatic, they can die or fall somewhere inbetween.

@Invasionofthegutsnatchers

Yup. The people who want to live with it are the first to complain that their public transport is cancelled, no GP appointments, their child is put into another class or taught by an unqualified teacher, the supermarket shelves are empty. Selfish.

Truthfully this is as good as it’s going to get for a good while whilst treatments and vaccines play catch up with variants. As long as covid doesn’t have any nasty mutations laying in wait it’s certainly possible to ‘live with it’.

I think, and it is only an opinion, is the societal shift is off kilter. We now have to live alongside a very contagious virus and people aren’t really prepared to acknowledge the bigger picture that it will impact quality of life in various ways. For example - to my knowledge there are no plans or encouragement for schools and workplaces to adjust their sickness thresholds despite covid clearly still making people ill enough to be in bed for a few days. This now exists as well as stuff we’re used to; flu’s, norovirus, etc. there’s no allowances for not threatening non-attendance fines, sickness policies that don’t trigger disciplinaries….

The minimisation currently that covid ‘is just a cold’ really isn’t helpful and does nothing to address the problems that this virus can and does still cause.

I wish it was a bit ill for a few days, for the great majority it’s much worse than that
Source please?
Before the vaccines, 30% of people were asymptomatic. Now that most are vaccinated, that number will have increased.

Cases 3 weeks ago were 93,000 - probably far more because many people don't report LFT results, some estimate as many as 3x more, but let's call it 200,000. Hospital admissions this week are 16,000. Hardly the "great majority" beibg badly affected - especially considering that will include patients who only tested positive after being admitted for something else.

@TheKeatingFive

I called the school to tell them she barely has a common cold and the office staff just kept repeating my dc can't return until well again when I said she's fine.

There's no way they can sustain excluding children for a stuffy nose, some kids will never actually be in school. A few calls to the LEA and that policy will be dust pretty quick.

Yeah, that sort of thing is not going to last long. The attendance rates would be through the floor. The mentality will change as institutions get more used to the unavailability of widespread free tests.

[quote Invasionofthegutsnatchers]@MajorCarolDanvers Right so when I sat up in bed and cried last week because I was too ill to come to work I should have phoned in sick rather than hauling myself into work, crying at my desk, struggling all day for 11 hours and going home to ignore my kids all evening, doing no housework and falling out with my husband because it wasn't flu. Don't split hairs please. I was fucking ill. I should have stayed at home in bed. I wasn't safe to look after 30 needy, disadvantaged 4 year olds with no TA in an environment they aren't ready for whilst being observed by SLT. I should have stayed at home whilst they were split between classes taught by a TA who doesn't know them. No interventions would happen. No speech therapy. No crucial conversations with their carers.

But no, keep telling me what I should have done differently whilst being grateful it wasn't YOUR child being shortchanged by a broken system. Be thankful people like me turn up for work and try our best because without us there would be nothing for your kids.[/quote]
If you are too ill to go to work don’t go to work.

The children would have been ok for a day or two with alternatives be they TAs or other teachers.