(Not me)
After missing Thanksgiving due to illness and being sick for a solid month after that, I was looking forward to Christmas with my family. My 20-year-old cousin with thalassemia had pneumonia recently and my elderly mom has had nightsweats and a constant cough after coming down with something my brother brought home from work in early November. He got better; she didn't. She's finished two rounds of antibiotics and had a chest x-ray which is rare for someone who avoids medical care like the plague. Then I got the news that my sister had bloody diarrhea and respiratory symptoms--classic COVID symptoms for her.
Christmas is cancelled.
All of this is an inconvenience at worst, but viral infection is not. It can lead to complications like pneumonia or fatal lung scarring diseases and permanent disabilities like heart failure, long COVID or Type I diabetes. The majority of the over 80 autoimmune diseases in existence from MS to lupus to rheumatoid arthritis are triggered by viral infections. That's why I'm so adamant about staying tf home when you're unwell.
I know America has horrid working conditions & some jobs have no sick leave. I talk about it all the time in my articles and real life. That absolutely needs to change. The solution is not to continue coming in sick to work indefinitely, it's organizing and striking until your demands are met. Like workers in every other developed country in the world. You can also change jobs/careers. Continuing to work under these conditions is not acceptable because it's a silent endorsement of them; another topic for another day.
Truth
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Well, can you? Punk?
But let's be real: the majority of the problem comes from workaholic adults who DO have sick leave & choose to come in while sick anyway, or to drop their sick child off at daycare/school while they're puking & shitting everywhere. Some of you insist on taking optional outings to the clothing or grocery store, a sit-down restaurant or a bowling alley while acutely unwell. I know because I hear your hacking cough and see your uncovered sneeze. I also see your pale, red-faced baby screaming bloody murder with crusty eyes and snot running down to its chin. Shame on you.
Going to work while you're sick is bad enough, but sending your kid to school/daycare while THEY'RE sick is bad parenting & you should feel bad. It shows a major lack of empathy to send them out into the world when they should be resting and recovering in bed (or perhaps at the pediatrician being treated). I can hear you now protesting "But-but-but they weren't sick when I dropped them off!" Great, then I'm not talking to you. Unless you then chose to leave them there after finding out. I'm talking to people who KNOWINGLY push their sick child out of bed, onto a bus full of people & make them the teacher's problem for the day. During COVID when kids did remote learning & parents worked from home, domestic violence rates soared. That told me all I needed to know about how Americans really feel about their own families.
I don't care that you have things to do--they're YOUR kids! You shouldn't have had them if your plan was to pawn them off on the nearest non-related adult when they should be home with YOU. School is not your babysitter--it's where kids go to learn, which isn't happening if your sick kid is disrupting class by puking all over the floor or sitting in the nurse's office all day. Sick kids don't learn & are a distraction to other students.
Being sent to school while acutely sick or in blinding pain is one of my worst memories from childhood. The embarrassment you feel rocking back and forth in pain while trying not to puke. The sensory overload of the flickering fluorescent lights and the smell of chalk and the teacher's voice. I once fell down the stairs & sprained my ankle--a pain my mother knew personally because she'd done it herself--and she refused to pick me up 2 hours early. I couldn't WALK. But there were countless other times I was sent to school with searing pain from endometriosis or something infectious and needed to be home in bed.
Consequences
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We're #1: Countries with highest monkeypox rates
The U.S. has the worst infectious illness rates in the developed world. We led the entire planet in COVID infections and deaths for the whole pandemic, and we currently serve as a hotspot for treatment-resistant fungal infections, pertussis (whooping cough) and monkeypox to name a few.
While developing nations like Africa or S. America often get the blame for STARTING pandemics, the U.S. has always been one of the worst offenders in enabling their spread. Take AIDS for example: a disease that originated in central Africa in the 1920s and was carried to Haiti by substitute teachers who'd worked there in the '60s somehow became a full-blown epidemic in the U.S. The cause? Our filthy blood donation practices, drug laws that made obtaining clean syringes illegal & unsafe sexual practices which were rampant during the '60s and '70s.
The U.S. was among the only countries on Earth to accept blood from Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier, whose Hemo-Caribbean agency had virtually no safety measures and paid poor blood donors $3 a day at a rate of 6,000 donors per month, then sending that blood & plasma onto the U.S. This 1972 NY Times article raised the red flag almost a full decade before AIDS was discovered in 1981!
But the bad decisions continued well after we knew how AIDS was spread.
Not 1 CEO tried for (mass) murder.
Our president refused to utter the word "AIDS" in public until 1987... six whole YEARS after it was discovered. Sex Ed classes were forbidden from teaching safer sex if it meant discussing icky things like anal sex ("sodomy" to the religious crowd). Blood banks including the Red Cross refused to take measures that would've made blood donations safer until 1985--several years after they knew AIDS was a blood-borne disease. Why? It cost money & might make gay blood donors angwy. Then Bayer shipped that tainted blood to countries around the world, killing untold numbers of hemophiliac children who relied on a safe blood supply to live. Bath house owners refused to shutter their businesses despite being a known hot spot for transmission and rallied for the "right" of gay men to fuck strangers in public as thousands of those same gay men died horrible deaths.
Are we seeing a theme here? Let me spell it out for you: America puts profits and individual entitlements above the common good and pays a hefty price. Above the right of others to literally remain alive. And the idiocy continues with our "Back to Work" rallies during the height of COVID, dangerous plasma collection practices & working conditions in general.
I regret to inform you that your comfort/convenience do NOT come before another person's health and safety. We ALL have the right to life, liberty & pursuit of happiness, not just you. (Emphasis on the "life" bit). But your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Gun ownership might be legal but you don' t have a "right" to twirl a loaded gun at a busy intersection & play Russian roulette. You don't have to be at that intersection--all the people heading to work, the hospital, weddings, funerals & other places DO. Go play Russian roulette in your own house & risk your own life--you DO have that right. (This is a bad analogy for going out in public unnecessarily while sick but you hopefully get the picture).
Rights vs. Entitlements & the Common Good
Americans are unbalanced.
Americans confuse rights with entitlements and act as if they come with no responsibilities whatsoever. Let's break it down with some examples: You have a right to refuse to vaccinate your kids, but you don't have a right to send them to public schools, daycares or other places where they could infect the rest of us. Which is pretty much everywhere. You DO have the right to expose yourself to infectious illness at holiday gatherings, NYE parties & the like by not wearing a mask or staying home. You do NOT have the right to then go out in public without a mask and spread the illness after coming down with it. We all have the right to health & safety; to stay alive. NONE of us has do the right to ultimate comfort or convenience at the cost of another person's health, safety or life.
Killing someone makes you a murderer whether you do it with a gun or an infectious illness. (Or in the case of United Healthcare's Brian Thompson, with insurance denials & delays). Violence and murder include ANYTHING that causes another person to die, not just shooting them dead in the street. Your intentions don't matter because they're just as dead either way. A lot of you have the blood of your fellow Americans on your hands, all because you wanted to eat INSIDE the Applebees during a pandemic.
The price we pay in the form of lost productivity, economic hardship, healthcare worker burnout & healthcare costs due to this irresponsible, selfish behavior is unfathomable. If you go to work while sick, you infect other people--usually more than just one. Then THEY either have to miss work or come in sick and infect even MORE people, some of whom may end up hospitalized, dead or on disability for life. They bring it home to their kids, who then spread it in their classroom, causing MORE parents to have to stay home from work with them. This is why "no sick leave" policies are illogical: they cost more than it would cost to just pay workers to stay home while sick.
But regardless of our nation's policies, we all have a responsibility to not spread infectious illness. It's one intance where personal responsibility SHOULD be emphasized & is not. Staying home or wearing a mask is a temporary inconvenience; the alternative is far worse.
I'm sick & I missed Christmas. Give me money for my work? 🥹🙏
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