Silly Q - what's a continuous cough?

[taptonaria27]

Ds (12) has a bit of a cough. He often gets it when he gets a cold, he's only coughing once or twice in an evening- that's not a continuous cough requiring self isolation is it?
To the best of our knowledge we've not been anywhere or met anyone to worry about

I’ve got no idea either

DS1 has a slight cough...maybe coughs once a day and has basically had the same one on and off since starting nursery last year

I’ve got no idea what to do now

A cough that lasts longer than 8 weeks and is persistent (so you're coughing at regular intervals for a large portion of the day.

I think

Coughing almost continuously, not once or twice in half an hour or whatever.

They really need to give more information or else half the workforce are going to be off needlessly!

New cough - developed in recent days/weeks

Persistent - coughing for majority of the day. Interrupting your general day to day routine.

This is my interpretation. Not based on medical opinion.

That’s what I thought @NotJustAnyFucker

The advice is a bit vague when it needs to be more obvious

Boris used the wrong term. A continuous/persistent cough is one that goes on for days or weeks. He just meant if you have new cough!

It’s the kind of cough you get when you’re ill as opposed to when you’ve breathed in some dust. You know, you can’t cough it out, even if you stop coughing the urge to cough is still there often, it keeps coming back after short periods of relief.

I imagine it's similar to what I had once. I basically coughed and coughed and coughed. Went to OOH as thought it was a chest infection and they ran out with a nebuliser. Turns out continuous coughing is also a sign you can't really breathe I had pneumonia
Every time I breathed in, I coughed

I think if it's a cough that you haven't had before, that is not going away after a few hours. Anything that indicates that you might be coming down with something.

I assumed the sort of cough where you try and stop but you can't. The one that keeps you awake at night.

From NHS I form