To expect friends to be more considerate?

[PinkFlamingo25]

Mum to 3 month old. We have been v clear with friends and family that if we have visitors, it is on the basis that no one is sick. We were invited round to friend‘s house on Xmas day, when we got there, friend’s DM was clearly ill with a cold - tissues in hand, sniffly, sneezing etc. Someone asked if she was sick and initially she said something about onions making her sneeze, and then the second time, said yes, it’s suddenly come on and she must have caught from her granddaughter (friend’s DD) who had the sniffles. If we had been given a heads up, I wouldn’t have taken my own DS there. DS ended up with a cold a few days later, thankfully not horrendous but snotty and congested for 2 weeks. Relatively certain he caught it there as we hadn’t been anywhere/out of the house around Xmas. Yesterday friends asked if they could visit to see baby. They arrive and mentions their DD has had a temperature and that she’s probably teething. This morning, get a message saying she’s come out in spots overnight and suspected chickenpox, later confirmed by GP. AIBU to be annoyed that my DS has been exposed to chickenpox? Given they know our stance of sickness, should they have given us a heads up that DS may be under the weather, and given us the choice as to whether it was ok that they still came around?

The difficulty when you have a young child is that they are basically always a bit ill or recovering, which makes it very hard to work out if they are a risk. They can keep coughing 3 weeks after a cold, for example, so it's very hard to tell if they are newly ill or not.

The first year my 2 were both in nursery, they started in September and it wasn't until August (in our summer holiday) that they were both well including no coughs or runny noses for a whole week. It would have been completely impossible to keep them home for nearly a whole year.

@2O25 The chicken pox vaccine took so long for a couple of reasons:

1. When it was first being considered by the NHS, it was right around the Andrew Wakefield nonsense and it was felt that the public wouldn't accept an additional vaccine being added.
2. There's a school of thought that the natural exposure to chicken pox by adults protects against shingles, but the vaccine wouldn't do this.
3. There were some concerns about the vaccine immunity not lasting as long as natural immunity and therefore resulting in more adults getting chicken pox which can be more dangerous. This seems not to be really the case though.

Thing is, all the people saying colds are everywhere, it could be RSV and there’s no way of telling - you don’t want a young baby catching that as it can lead to serious illness.

It’s clear that most people don’t give a fuck about other people catching their germs and the sometimes serious consequences of that.

I noticed a long time ago we now live in a ‘Why should I?’ nation where not many people have any thought or care about anyone else so long as they can do what they want.