HELP! Anyone else not meeting up/going out due to fears of covid??24 weeks!

[Tra06]

I should add I’m a doctor but stopped seeing patients face to face as I was constantly getting coughs and fevers booked in around 20 weeks.

For the past four weeks pregnancy has seemed much more ‘real to me’. This is my second pregnancy of 2021- my first time pregnant ended in an loss at 11 weeks. I’ve been pregnant since December 2020 bar 3 months off!!

Throughout it, on and off ive been anxious and extra cautious and chose to meet people outdoors/lateral flow. But as soon as I felt baby kick I’ve become so protective and literally havnt met a soul for a month. All my friends don’t understand my fears and are hanging out in big groups. My husband also isn’t that supportive, and we’ve regularly argued about my concerns because he feels it’s unfounded that I’m going overboard. He often peoples with people for dinners and we sleep in separate rooms on those nights because I’m doing so much to prevent me getting covid that the thought of catching it from him makes me feel silly.

I don’t feel down about it/isolated- if anything I feel positive because all I want is for baby to be safe and I feel calmer knowing I can do this by staying home! But a lot of comments from other people, mainly passive aggressive like ‘oh guess we won’t see you for your whole pregnancy’ sometimes bug me.

Am I the only woman currently pregnant living like this??

To add- I’ve literally done all I can to protect baby. I’m TRIPLE jabbed (got my booster over the weekend) and staying home, masking up at work (still work in the hospital but just doing telephone consults)…am I really crazy?? Am I setting a terrible cycle that I can’t break with a newborn? Advice please!!!

@nether

As you're a doctor, how do you advise your highly vulnerable patients to live? Anyone on cancer treatment or post-transplant for example (those in the group who had third primary and whose booster will be their fourth jab) Are you telling them only to go out for essential medical appointments?

Pregnant women are not at greater risk than that group

Living in isolation (such as when that group were advised to shield, and with paused and post shielding advice on minimisation) is really, really tough. And of course very hard to achieve unless you live alone or all your cohabitants also choose to withdraw with you

Where someone has capacity to make their own decisions, they should be supported and encouraged to do so. I provide my patients with the evidence and what their team would recommend based on their individual risk factors, but ultimately it is an individual's decision what risks they choose to take.

From a general perspective, I would be starting from a baseline of being more cautious than before and having a low threshold for taking additional precautions. We're coming into a time of year when we know respiratory viruses flourish, which means increased risks of transmission, including of Covid. On top of that, the newly identified Omicron variant has a number of concerning mutations which may well mean it can spread more easily and potentially have some vaccine escape properties. We still don't know how this variant manifests in different populations - so far the documented cases have seemed not too severe, but we don't have enough information to say if this is its standard presentation, if there are groups of people who might be disproportionately affected by more severe illness, etc. So, I would recommend caution.

A general recommendation is to go harder (take more precautions) and sooner than you would ideally like, when dealing with these unknowns. Placing restrictions on your own lifestyle can be tough on your mental and physical health, but probably not as tough as getting seriously ill, ending up in hospital (potentially ICU), or dying. Ultimately, though, people need to make their own decisions about what lifestyle changes to make and when, based on the best available evidence.

Hi all, just came across this post and so many of the posts sum up exactly how I feel. Just wondering how is everyone managing now? Particularly with restrictions lifting. Thanks