Last Thursday, I was called to pick up Toddler early from daycare because he was lethargic and temperature was starting to climb. Also found out that another kid in class had croup.
Toddler is sick through the weekend. I rapid-test him for COVID and he’s negative. By Monday he has no fever, but lingering cough. We wait the 72 hours per daycare rules, and try and send him off on Thursday. He gets kicked out an hour later because he still has a cough. We need to get a doctors note saying that he’s not contagious.
We message Kaiser. They want him to take a PCR COVID test before they clear him. We do that. Finally, Friday afternoon, he gets the negative COVId test and the doctor’s note. Earliest we can take him to daycare is Tuesday because they’re closed for Columbus Day.
Meanwhile, I have done very little work since last Thursday. My husband and I were planning to alternate childcare so that we’d split the sick leave. But, whenever I try to work, my toddler screams for MAMA. I have also now caught whatever he had, so on top of all that, not feeling great either.
I don’t blame daycare for their policies, but they don’t have it written down anywhere!!! Their written policy says he needs to stay home 24 hours after fever breaks, but we were told due to Covid it’s actually 72 hours. This whole doctors note thing with a cough is new
Ugh that sounds terrible! We did a similarly confusing dance with daycare and the doctor’s office several times. We started schlepping her over to the pediatrician for a PCR test at the first sign of a sniffle so we could minimize time out of daycare.
Honestly, COVID policies and daycare colds are why we switched to a part-time nanny last week. It’s one thing to know your kid is going to get colds in daycare, it’s something else entirely to have to pull them out for things that didn’t used to warrant staying home and wait an extra 2-3 days for PCR tests more than once a month.
The state government has mandated that all workers in my industry be vaccinated by 1 January. I have spent a lot of time this week having what I consider to be very frustrating conversations with the people within my team (6 direct reports and then about 45 people who report to them) that feel like they go in circles. But also realised a lot of people really over estimate my power to do anything
I did have one guy ask me “since when do the government get to make laws that affect what people can do?”
Which really made me wonder who he thought had made all the other laws
Apparently, masking in schools and a vaccine mandate for staff is super effective. My kids go to school in Denver Public Schools, which is a big public system but I didn’t know how big. I keep looking at these numbers of how many DPS students are infected–right now it is 200–but I didn’t know how many kids are in DPS. So I finally looked it up. It is ninety-two thousand. So the percent of DPS students who are currently considered to be infected is 0.2%.That… seems manageable? Especially since it is usually just 1 case per school, meaning they are not spreading it at school.
In contrast, during the peak of infection last holiday season, more than 1% of Denver residents were infected at one time.
This was esp interesting to me; “For children with such a condition, the danger is higher but still lower than many people believe. The risk of long Covid among children — a source of fear among many parents — also appears to be very low.”
The thing is… not really though. Not to downplay that number as a tragic number of deaths, but that’s a really small portion of the labor market. That’s less than 1/333 Americans right?. (Last estimate of US population was 333 million?) And a lot of those people were past working age. So that’s an incredibly small % of the working population. Much bigger issues are things like the insane lack of childcare, long covid cases resulting in disability, people with pre existing disabilities unable to work safely in their previous industry, etc.
I see what you’re saying but the job sectors facing shortages directly overlap with populations most likely to sit at the cross section of severe covid and younger than expected age. People in warehouses, factories, food processing, custodians, diner servers, kitchen staff, etc are so much more likely to face chronic stress diseases, poverty, multi gen living that exacerbate covid risks than a 50 year old w a desk job. So the tweetdoesn’t seem that misdirected especally considering if this person lives in an area with a diff vaccination rate profile
Someone made the point that elderly folks often provide childcare for grandkids etc so even if they’re retired they’re still an important part of the workforce
I remember back in the spring there being articles about line cooks being one of the hardest hit professions with COVID. It looks like Colorado and Massachusetts have released some more recent data broken out by profession.
(164,782/700,952) = 23.4% working age (below 65, above 18) people. So from here I would need national number for the different front line industries which I do not have time to track down rn unfortunately. But I started my homework lol.
