Covid outbreak at nursery- how long did it last

[MamaWhy]

Been quite lucky with my sons nursery regarding covid/sickness with only a few isolated cases up till recently.

We get an email saying theres been a covid case and the child/practitioner is now isolating and will not return untill negative.

The nursery currently have a big covid outbreak, been reciveing emails every day for a week now saying more covid cases. A relitive works at the nursery and says theres 10+ cases and they are having to use agency staff. Their policy is the child/staff cannot come in untill negative/after day 10 but there is no must test policy in place so it must be a child with it that keeps coming in and the parents arent testing. Also had an email today saying sevral cases of sickness and dioreah.

My son only attends tuesdays, i choose to keep him off today to avoid him getting poorly. My only worry is how long will this outbreak last? I cant keep having him out of nursery. Today i had to leave an hour before i started work to drop him to a friends house at 7am the oppicite direction to my work.

I really wouldn't bother trying to avoid catching it. You're going to get it at some point. Just live your life normally.

I agree, you really can't avoid catching it with a young child. By all means take him out if there are a lot of cases, but he'll likely pick it up at some point.

We've had lots of clusters of cases and lots of single cases.

If you’re bothered about covid or S&D or anything else then I’d avoid nursery altogether.

We’re always getting emails for H,F&M, Impetigo, Chickenpox, S&D and now Covid-19… It just comes with having kids.

I had covid in febuary and used all my remaining holiday so that my pay would not be affected. Trying to avoid my son getting it right now as i have no holiday left so it would screw my wages, as a single mum and with living costs rising its the last thing I need right now. If he gets it next month in the next holiday year i wouldnt be so stressed about having to take time off as i could use holiday to make up the loss of pay again

Also to put the 10+ cases into perspective... his nursery is a small nursery with no more than 30 children

Thing is, you can’t put a end on it.

Not covid but a stomach bug has just gone round DDs class. It took 3 weeks from first child to last child (& it took out 24/27 kids 😱). In that time, it spread to other classes via siblings.

You just don’t know with covid, you could avoid this outbreak by keeping your kid at home but another child could catch it at softplay, a birthday party, from family, siblings & bring it into nursery at any singular point in time..

To be fair, if you are just trying to hang on until April 01, the only option is to keep him at home until then. There will be no more testing from then anyone, so you’ll never know if he has covid at that point. If he’s well enough to go in, you’ll be able to send him in!

Just to add to this, we kept our 2 year old daughter(2 when it first started) out of nursery until she was 3 and a half, she was at home constantly with us to avoid it. She started nursery in August there and has just tested positive a few days ago due to a nursery outbreak. I feel quite guilty about sending her in last week as we had recieved a letter saying there had been positive cases, but realistically what can you do? I tried my hardest to shield and protect her but with the infectiousness of Omicron everyone is going to get it now, the amount of people/kids I hear with it at the moment is staggering.