A family member is all upset, her husband came down sick with covid.
CLEARLY this is the fault of some un-masked person who dared go out in public!
Meanwhile I’m here reading her description of how he was sick with a scratchy throat for less than a week and had a low grade fever (less than 100) for 3 days and thinking to myself “nice! Not only did he get off light, he’s now got legit antibodies from the current strain to bolster his shots!”.
Its a respiratory virus for fucks sake! Not ebola! Not HIV!
Even the various sections of the .GOV have admitted that the shots don’t stop transmission. More and more data shows that anything short of a properly fitted N95 mask is damn near useless for stopping virus transmission. And I swear to god the CDC keeps coming out with the stupidest research in trying to insist that masks work.
EVERYONE is going to get it. Just like the flu. Once it spread beyond that first town in where-ever (regardless of the actual source) it was never going to be possible to stop it. Infact, getting it now, when you’re recently vax’d, boostered, AND most likely to be exposed to the Omicron variant (which is mild mild in comparison to the original), is probably the best way to get it and the antibodies that natural infection brings.
Meanwhile theres also a growing database of the damaging side affects of masking and isolation on the public in general and children in particular. Both the damage masking is doing to the wearer, and also to people who see mostly masked faces.
The constant restrictions have fucked the economy and the supply chain (world wide!) to the point where its going to take years to fix even if we could actually get everyone to STOP FUCKING WITH IT FURTHER today.
The .GOV went out of its way to suppress treatments and discussion of things that mitigate symptoms and severity while the media does their damndest to make it all look as bad and horrible as possible. We’re going to be generations fixing the damage done to the public’s trust in the health care system.
Just stop. Its a respiratory virus. Your chances of dying from it were never all that high, and they’ve continued to drop. Just stop for fucks sake.
It sounds like his symptoms were so mild that if we weren’t in a pandemic, he probably wouldn’t have even seen a doctor or taken any sort of test to find out what it was. If the test wasn’t free, I’ll bet he wouldn’t have gotten that. He would have assumed it was a cold or something (clearly not knowing him I’m making assumptions). Happy that he was lightly affected.
Eventually a person will get it, or not. I’ve never had a flu shot, except maybe as a little kid – certainly not since I reached my mid teens when I became responsible for my medical care. And I’ve never knowingly had it. Been around plenty of people who did – and still insisted on coming into work (I hate that btw), but I never got any symptoms. So did I have it and not know, or did my system fight it off before there would have been enough virus to show a positive, have symptoms, and enough virus load to become contagious? Doesn’t really matter, just the luck of the draw for me to this point.
I really think there is more to have issue with people that don’t wash their hands (or even worse, pretend wash) after using facilities than whether they mask or not.
To be fair, he did go into the doctor thinking it was strep, so I’m assuming the sore throat was fairly miserable, but as Covid symptoms go its still pretty minor. I don’t know what his tolerance level is for that sort of thing either. I get a sore throat every time I have a sinus infection. Sometimes a REALLY BAD sore throat, so I tend to shrug unless it actually starts causing problems.
I think its a combination of things.
1: yup, people don’t wash their hands properly. Thats why so many of us who work with the public tend to call the general public the “unwashed masses”. And while they may have washed properly for a while when 2020 hit alot of people went back to being lazy fairly quickly.
2: the USA has a huge culture of “you’d better be on your death’s bed if you’re going to call out sick”. Its one of the things that I’d kinda hoped might be changed by C19 (but it looks like not so much). So many people feel that they’re being lazy if they call out sick when they’re not THAT sick. Or their employer only offers a minimum of sick time and has huge penalties if you go over that and so they feel that they have no choice. The end result is the over spreading of germs that didn’t need to be spread.
The last two places I’ve worked at would put up signs during the winter that said to stay home if sick (way before covid). One small mfg I worked for even did away with a set sick time – they would pay for any time that you were out sick (within reason) to encourage people to stay home when ill. And yes, that covered the people in production who couldn’t work from home.
Where I work at now, everyone gets a laptop, so they can take it home and work from there. On site meeting rooms have phone set ups for those who can’t be there – which is often since some people may be in other states. So, there is no excuse for showing up to work sick (for office workers), even if not “that” sick. But, that didn’t stop people that are visibly miserable and ill from showing up to share their germs.
I believe that production people get a healthy amount of sick time at my current place – I don’t personally know since I don’t get any (being an office worker). They also get personal holidays (~4 days per year) on top of a lot of PTO. I admit, that probably isn’t the norm for service/retail workers, but I believe has become more prevalent in manufacturing settings.
I have no clue on manufacturing.
But yah, not so much for retail/service industry. As a part time associate I get 2hrs of sick time for every 30 I work. A FT associate gets 4. I have 3 weeks of vacation time, but that doesn’t count towards sick time. I can use vacation to fill out my paycheck if I call out sick, but if I don’t have enough sick time available to cover my callout then I get an occurrence. Late by more than 7 minutes counts as an occurrence. 3 occurrences in 6 months gets me a write-up. And it spirals really quickly towards termination after that. Management can waive occurrences, but all it takes is one stickler boss and you’re screwed. For someone with kids who used all their sick time taking care of hte kids? Yah, you’re going to come to work if you can even sorta manage it because you need the paycheck. Can’t do our job from home!
They gave us an extra two weeks worth of sick time in 2020, and it was heaven.
Plus then there’s people with jobs like mine. My job means I’m inside the store, outside the store, inside the store, working in a cooler area of the store, a warmer area of hte store, outside the store…..I have a drippy nose year round. Its my normal. Its much harder for folks like me to determine “sick symptoms” vs “normal day”.
Nor does it do anything for the culture of “MUST WORK even when sick”. I don’t know how to fix the cultural aspect of it, but a wider recognition that people need to be allowed to not work when they feel ill by employers would help.
I think it would help, ALOT if the service/retail industries started with allowing it in better form. While there are absolutely adults who’ve made these jobs their life (like me) these are also the jobs that kids start out at, so they get indoctrinated young that if you want that paycheck you need to go to work.
Or maybe it starts earlier. Kids and their parents get penalized if the kid stays home from school sick. The kid by having to many sick outs can mean up to legal problems, the adults by having to deal with those legal problems AND deal with having to call out of their work to take care of a sick kid. So instead they send the sick kid to school. So kids are indoctrinated early that if you’re not THAT sick you still do your job.
Dear god in heaven. We’re now over a week out from the last day of his fever. They’re still not sharing a bedroom or a bathroom and he’s masking anytime they’re around each other.
I know she’s immune compromised, but this is beyond that. If she was going to get sick from exposure to him it would have happened before his fever broke.
And they’re waiting for him to do another PCR test to be sure he’s negative. Except that the CDC admitted back in January that you can test positive on a PCR test for weeks and weeks after recovering from Covid because they RUN IT AT TO HIGH A CYCLE RATE.