My boss was out last Sunday, tested negative in the morning but positive by the time he got home after leaving work early due to feeling ill, back in to work less than a week later, just hoping wasn't infectious. He seems to feel like he should set an example as in people should make an effort to get into work even if unwell - but I don't think it advisable.
COVID-19 (Coronavirus) discussion
- Thread starter ThundyCat
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My boss was out last Sunday, tested negative in the morning but positive by the time he got home after leaving work early due to feeling ill, back in to work less than a week later, just hoping wasn't infectious. He seems to feel like he should set an example as in people should make an effort to get into work even if unwell - but I don't think it advisable.
Caporegime
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Lol, yeah. I have very few people on ignore but the ones I do are all from this thread ( and have a reputation of derailing other topics ). Life is too short to waste time arguing with the ignorant.Whenever I view a COVID thread, it's mostly hidden replies for this very reason
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It's part of western/capitalist culture. The mantra is a cold or flu shouldn't prevent you from working ; those that take time off are threatened with having pay docked, or at the very least made to feel like a slacker. Wholly different attitude in many asian countries. Yet studies have shown that bringing these viral infections into the workplace costs more lost man-hours than if people stayed at home until recovered. SARS-CoV2 raises the stakes further, but old habits die hard.
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It boggles my mind sometimes - especially with managers who'll insist on face to face conversations, while spluttering and coughing, with whoever is going to cover for them while off sick risking that person then being off causing a right mess and/or risking prolonging the impact to the workplace, while none of it couldn't have been handled over email and WhatsApp. Yet in other aspects they are so sharp when it comes to the impact to the business.
If you can't understand how even just an extra 3% of people being ill for months at a time can affect society you're possibly not understanding how tight the margins of staffing are in some professions.
3% of retail staff being off work for a few months is something that can be absorbed as (no offence to retail staff) they're not "skilled", you can generally train someone up to do the job with some degree of efficiency in a week, 3% of say electricians, train drivers, pilots, lawyers, or doctors is something that can cause real issues (especially as we didn't have enough doctors to cover shifts before covid).
Or that since 2019 the number of people of "working age" off work long term has jumped by about 40% (IIRC gone from around 1.9 million unable to work due to health, to 2.6), I can't imagine what changed since 2019 that might have caused more people to become long term ill, or that might have resulted in people who were long term ill but able to work dropping out of the workforce or taking early retirement*.
Yup
1 person off due to being ill and infectious is nothing (or should be nothing) in any reasonably well run business with plenty of staff. If you can't cope with someone being off with the flu then how are you going to manage if they're off for months due to an injury, or worse get hit by a bus and die.
However if that person comes in and infects half a dozen more so they're all working at well below normal efficiency you might get those 8 hours extra of someone being in the office, but get everyone working at half speed and making more mistakes.
Yet the bad managers only look at if someone was in work, as that's the metric that can be checked at a glance.
*I've seen quite a few people that have mentioned doing just that at the recommendation of their doctors/specialists.
I did. Retired a few years earlier than planned on doctors advice.
Nice comment piece on why exaggerating the impact of long covid is harmful..
www.telegraph.co.uk
All pandemics of novel infectious diseases are accompanied by social pandemics of fear and action. Unless the social pandemics are artificially prolonged, they eventually subside as people come to a realistic appreciation of the actual risks of the infectious virus or bacterium. For many people, Covid-19 was never a greater threat than familiar respiratory infections like influenza. The policy issue today is how best to mitigate the risks for those who are particularly vulnerable, mainly through targeted vaccination programmes.
As with other infections, Covid-19 can have a long-term impact on some of those who become ill. One way in which interested parties can prolong social pandemics is by promoting a condition called Long Covid. In the summer of 2021, for example, this risk was cited by the British Medical Association, Independent Sage and associated groups lobbying for delay in the planned exit from lockdown on 21 June. It continues to be invoked by some whenever there is a small increase in Covid infections.
These processes are familiar to medical sociologists. They start by assuming that any malaise occurring after a person thinks they have been infected with Covid-19 was caused by that virus. These subjective reports are collected into sets of supposed cases from which inferences are made about the frequency and severity of the condition. These inferences become the basis for claims that perpetuate fears and demand actions, like masking, regardless of the mixed evidence for their effectiveness. In the process, the real suffering of a small number of people gets lost.
Long Covid starts from an expectation we should recover quickly from infections. This ignores the uniqueness of the antibiotic era. We do get over bacterial infections quickly – but we did not do that before the 1950s. There used to be lots of convalescent facilities for those who could afford the time off – and they were closed because they were no longer needed. There have never been equivalent drugs for viral infections but we have tended to expect the same results. Anyone who has had a bout of influenza – not “flu” – will confirm that it can take months to feel really well again.
Yet it is important to be sure that someone actually had Covid-19 in the first place. The symptoms are now difficult to distinguish from other minor respiratory infections. Community testing is not accurate enough for rigorous studies. Research cannot be based simply on claims that an infection was Covid-19 without laboratory confirmation.
As more time passes, there are more opportunities for other infections or ageing processes to affect how we feel. Control groups are important. Are the experiences being reported really unique to people who have had Covid? If you give questionnaires to the general population, you find many people report experiencing some symptoms in the previous week or so and making little of them. They bring a sense of proportion to studies that only look at the experiences of people who think they had Covid and that it is responsible for how they now feel.
Previous research points to the interests that may be involved in inflating the scale of ill-defined conditions. It has been claimed that hyperactivity was boosted by pharmaceutical companies hoping to sell drugs for its treatment and by political critics of inflexible school systems. Long Covid is sustained by similar interests. It offers opportunities to a medical-industrial complex to gain access to public funding for research, development and the sale of treatments. It is also a useful weapon for critics of contemporary societies to press for wider changes consistent with their preferred values, regardless of democratic principles.
In the middle of all this noise are the true victims – the small number of people who have suffered the long-term consequences associated with many infections. They deserve high-quality clinical and scientific research to inform treatments rather than exploitation for other people’s ends.
‘Long Covid’ is a failure of science
It offers opportunities to a medical-industrial complex to gain access to public funding for research, while the real victims get lost
www.telegraph.co.uk
All pandemics of novel infectious diseases are accompanied by social pandemics of fear and action. Unless the social pandemics are artificially prolonged, they eventually subside as people come to a realistic appreciation of the actual risks of the infectious virus or bacterium. For many people, Covid-19 was never a greater threat than familiar respiratory infections like influenza. The policy issue today is how best to mitigate the risks for those who are particularly vulnerable, mainly through targeted vaccination programmes.
As with other infections, Covid-19 can have a long-term impact on some of those who become ill. One way in which interested parties can prolong social pandemics is by promoting a condition called Long Covid. In the summer of 2021, for example, this risk was cited by the British Medical Association, Independent Sage and associated groups lobbying for delay in the planned exit from lockdown on 21 June. It continues to be invoked by some whenever there is a small increase in Covid infections.
These processes are familiar to medical sociologists. They start by assuming that any malaise occurring after a person thinks they have been infected with Covid-19 was caused by that virus. These subjective reports are collected into sets of supposed cases from which inferences are made about the frequency and severity of the condition. These inferences become the basis for claims that perpetuate fears and demand actions, like masking, regardless of the mixed evidence for their effectiveness. In the process, the real suffering of a small number of people gets lost.
Long Covid starts from an expectation we should recover quickly from infections. This ignores the uniqueness of the antibiotic era. We do get over bacterial infections quickly – but we did not do that before the 1950s. There used to be lots of convalescent facilities for those who could afford the time off – and they were closed because they were no longer needed. There have never been equivalent drugs for viral infections but we have tended to expect the same results. Anyone who has had a bout of influenza – not “flu” – will confirm that it can take months to feel really well again.
Yet it is important to be sure that someone actually had Covid-19 in the first place. The symptoms are now difficult to distinguish from other minor respiratory infections. Community testing is not accurate enough for rigorous studies. Research cannot be based simply on claims that an infection was Covid-19 without laboratory confirmation.
As more time passes, there are more opportunities for other infections or ageing processes to affect how we feel. Control groups are important. Are the experiences being reported really unique to people who have had Covid? If you give questionnaires to the general population, you find many people report experiencing some symptoms in the previous week or so and making little of them. They bring a sense of proportion to studies that only look at the experiences of people who think they had Covid and that it is responsible for how they now feel.
Previous research points to the interests that may be involved in inflating the scale of ill-defined conditions. It has been claimed that hyperactivity was boosted by pharmaceutical companies hoping to sell drugs for its treatment and by political critics of inflexible school systems. Long Covid is sustained by similar interests. It offers opportunities to a medical-industrial complex to gain access to public funding for research, development and the sale of treatments. It is also a useful weapon for critics of contemporary societies to press for wider changes consistent with their preferred values, regardless of democratic principles.
In the middle of all this noise are the true victims – the small number of people who have suffered the long-term consequences associated with many infections. They deserve high-quality clinical and scientific research to inform treatments rather than exploitation for other people’s ends.
Yes proper influenza can hit a person hard, but the ratio of people where they need actual convalescence and/or medical treatment is much higher with COVID. That article makes or tries to make a lot of false equivalences.
Think I'd rather have covid now than 'proper influenza' in the 50's to be fair..
A similar thing will likely happen with time, where society is made up increasingly by people with a higher resistance to the disease resulting in it apparently being milder by average, although modern medicine somewhat messes with that - keeping people alive or in some form of OK health who'd otherwise not be.
Man of Honour
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The NHS, my employer, disagrees with you.
They were willing to have me back at work last Thursday since my first symptoms were on the Friday before the Monday I tested positive..
If you have a positive coronavirus test result, try to stay at home and avoid contact with other people for 5 days after the day you took your test, or from the day your symptoms started (whichever was earlier). You should count the day after you took the test as day 1
I saw the Telegraph piece in the early hours. I awaited someone to post it with the expected pile on. This thread should be renamed the "Covid support group"
Any chat from you devotes about Jenny Harris?
I understand fear but you can find help if you are always scared (hypersensitivity)
Good luck to you all.
Any chat from you devotes about Jenny Harris?
U.K. Health Security Agency Head: We’ll Behave More Like Sweden When the Next Pandemic Hits
I understand fear but you can find help if you are always scared (hypersensitivity)
Good luck to you all.
Soldato
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Says the guy reading covid articles at 2am rushing to post his thoughts in the “covid support group”
Good luck to you too.
What I will say - probably 20% of people at work have had a 4th or 5th bout of COVID so far since this all started, most of them since 2021, when they are performing below normal for around a 1/3rd of the year because of that does have a fair impact on work... for many it is obviously taking its toll as well, if this is an ongoing thing it will need compensating for.
Man of Honour
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I thought it hit Sweden hard a few months later.
They didn't get it earlier on because the majority of citizens live in rural areas but then it hit them.
I also remember all the ICU staff walking out.
Swedish Covid-19 workers are quitting, leaving ICUs short-staffed
STOCKHOLM (Bloomberg) - Sweden faces a shortage of health-care workers as the number of resignations ticks up after a relentless year of caring for Covid-19 patients. Read more at straitstimes.com.
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All I can think of is the idiocy of it, Sweden has completely different demographics, social behaviours, population density, etc. etc. and even then in the longer run their outcomes for COVID was worse than those similar countries who approached it more cautiously.
EDIT: This is the worst "pandemic" of the pandemic, those with stupid ideas who can't see them for stupid ideas or think it amusing to push them - the whole pandemic could as it turns out have had a relatively minor impact if we'd just approached it sensibly at all levels of society from the start - it is tragic how few people actually understand what learning to live with a disease like this actually means as well.
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Man of Honour
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I'm personally sceptical about long covid as a condition but I'm also fairly comfortable with the data that covid can create some issues for some people which can affect people for a while after contracting it. I think it's rarer to have genuine long term issues (of course the more vulnerable is less of a surprise).
I think it has made people a little more health aware or at least cautious. Not a bad thing, but some hypochondria is occuring as well.
I think it has made people a little more health aware or at least cautious. Not a bad thing, but some hypochondria is occuring as well.
Man of Honour
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