Current guidelines are irresponsible

[Rookiemistake]

I am on my second bout of Covid in 8 months despite being fully vaccinated. I have been ill both times, pretty incapacitated for two days and a bit more functional for the last three. Regardless, it has been disruptive and I am healthy with no underlying conditions. My teen ds has also had it for the first time. He was similar to me and about to start mocks for his A Levels.

Talking to someone the other day and they said it'll be like flu and we'll learn to live with it. It's not like flu. I'm 43 and I've had flu twice in my whole life yet I've already had this twice in less than a year.

I have stayed at home and will do until I either test negative or reach 10 days and am not symptomatic. However, I could if I choose, just go around as normal. My ds was allowed back into school after three days if he felt well. He didn't go but he could have as he was feeling much better by day 4. He would have still been spreading it and there are kids at school and on his bus in the middle of their GCSE's. I just think we are being entirely irresponsible. This is not a cold.

I'm not advocating a full lockdown but I think there needs to be more stringent controls if people are knowingly positive.

What do others think?

Not so funnily, I already provide care for a family member as well as a child with additional needs. So due diligence means that any role I took I needed to protect those I'm responsible for.

I've never heard of an apprenticeship for a woman in her fifties, for example, which pays more than the minimum wage. Do you have links to such plentiful opportunities?

What makes it stranger is my previous employment, before I became too unwell to work, was in employment/careers itself. So you'd think I might have heard about such posts, wouldn't you?

To remain so ignorant of the ways in which people are stymied at every turn in their efforts to improve their future is both blinkered and alarming.

Well this got weird.

But other people's health isn't my problem. If they don't want to be sick they should just improve their health and not let it affect them so bad....

It is though.
Because if many people are ill, then the impact on the NHS will affect you the day you actually need health support.
It does when it means that services might not be a available (eg plane cancelled if staff is ill. Longer times to get passport etc...).
Etc.

Thinking that you are not affected if many people are getting ill/end up needing care etc... is a very narrow view of the world and misses the fact we are all interconnected (that's why we are a society, not individuals living next to each other)

Part of it is though when does it end - Covid is proving to be very adept at changing and creating new variants even more contagious that before.

I said at the beginning I thought this would be 2 years and part of that is to do with public attention span how long something can be seen as problematic and new before it is internalised and accepted as simply being so. We adapt easily - and yes we adapted well to controls such as isolating and masks but we have even more easily adapted to not wearing them.

And the current Thunder Fever doesnt help - I am having awful allergies at the moment (to the extent my taste and smell is odd) I could be testing every single day for the next month or so (and I am probably not alone)

I may be wrong, but I think that was supposed to be an equivalently stupid response to the idea that people are choosing jobs that only pay SSP and thus the lack of sick pay magically becomes irrelevant. A demonstration of how unsustainable it is to argue that nobody else should be penalised for your circumstances whilst also bleating about people being selfish over going into work whilst positive with covid. If so, it was quite adept.

And to try and take a wider point from that discussion, it isn't possible at this point to sensibly advocate for isolation without improvement in sick pay. Which OP evidently gets, even in the context of a generally sketchy argument.

i totally get where you are coming from OP ,but for the majority of us we will never be "knowingly positive" again as most of us will not be in the position of being able to test again (I've still never tested positive, nor has my youngest or my husband but we DO still have some free tests ) Its highly unlikely the majority of younger people will ever be offered free vaccines again (unless a mutation causing increased case fatality rate arrives)so you could argue catching the virus in the summer months and getting a "top up" of antibodies will benefit the wider, vulnerable/older community once winter hits...it's pretty much a given that these waves won't go away and we will have increased hospitalisations and deaths this autumn/winter. Sad but true but that's life and I kind of wish people would get quite so worked up about child deaths in developed countries (aprrox.750 under 5's die every day due to malaria ;1,400 every day due to treatable/preventable diarrhoea.....why is that different???).....and perhaps vote differently and demand more from our politicians so that we don't have people needing foodbanks or needing their minimum wages subsidised by taxpayers via the benefits system.

I only realised recently that vaccines have "flattened the curve" haven't they?
A similar number of people die but it's more like a thousand or so a week than the thousand a day we often saw in the first two years of covid.

Deaths due to Covid 19 are down to more like three hundred a week, not a thousand, but I think that's because we're at a temporary peak of herd immunity to the dominant strain right at the moment.

I wish I could remember where I read it, it said deaths were averaging at about 1000 a week (death certificate) and the U.K. death toll for 2022 was looking like being between 55,000 and 66,000 unless we had a worse autumn winter variant in which case deaths would be higher.
(The graphs is only England because I don't know how to bring the U.K. figures up.)

I think it also said that whereas covid was the number one cause of death in the U.K. in 2020 and 2021, covid was only the third largest cause of death so far in 2022.

Deaths have come down sharply over the last couple of weeks (ignoring the last reported week which doesn't count because of the bank holidays).
I'm looking at the weekly ONS death certificate "deaths due to Covid" figure.
ONS "deaths involving Covid" are higher and the live "deaths within 28 days of a positive test" figures are higher again.

The "with Covid not of Covid" distinction which used to be a theoretical point and such a misleading distraction in the hands of dedicated Covid minimisers is now actually a big deal in the face of less severe but enormously transmissible strains and a less vulnerable population. If 10% of everyone has it at a given moment then 10% of all fatalities will have it.

So if someone dies and a doctor puts covid on their death certificate as one of the causes which category is that @OperationRinka?
Please can you post a link to the figures you're looking at. I'd like to understand all the distinctions.

Here's the weekly death registration figures

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales

The Covid tab has two columns, one for where Covid is mentioned on the death certificate as an incidental factor and one for where it's actually caused the death (maybe along with other factors).

Thank you @OperationRinka

YANBU. My son has a lot of medical issues and anyone in our household getting covid will seriously compromise his treatment. I appreciate that people need to work but please, if you have covid work from home if you can, get your shopping delivered and avoid unnecessary trips out/socialising.