This reads almost like they were -trying- to kill people, geez.
I’m not sure what our official policy is, but our unofficial policy is, if you want to stay home because you’re mildly sick, we still expect you to be reachable and working. If you’re not, you need to be taking PTO, and you probably still need to be reachable.
I have appreciated that policy when I had a head cold that was bad enough that I felt crummy and wanted to be able to nap over lunch, but not bad enough that I could justify not working through it.
I have NOT appreciated that policy when it was quarter-end and I had a full blown flu and was expected to work through it from home. It creates an environment where I’m pressured to work through situations I probably shouldn’t be.
Easy way to reduce headcount…
Add in given a sense of shirking your duties it sounds like the medical field.
I think your experience is not universal.
Yes, many of the past (and even more recent) studies were focused on the benefit (or lack thereof) to the wearer of the mask. I haven’t really seen a quality “protect others from you” study but if you’ve seen one I’d be happy to take a look.
A lot of what I have seen are mechanistic studies - usually manikins in a lab - that show how masks can stop droplets exiting the mouth or nose. I have not seen anything conclusive that shows that SARS-Cov2 spreads through droplets rather than aerosols. Also, these lab studies usually have very limited or qualified application to real world applications - for example, they don’t address the wide variety of cloth face coverings people actually wear, how they’re wearing them, how long they’re wearing them, how much they’re touching them, what happens to those droplets that are in the masks all day (do they get aerosolized as the wearer continues to breath in and out for 8 more hours?), etc.
And there’s lots of observational data, from e.g. Japan in 2019 not stopping the flu, to lots of places in 2020-21 that at least show that mask mandates & widespread mask use (if not masks themselves) do basically nothing to stop the spread of respiratory viruses in the real world.
Completely understandable on your part. No one likes snot-nosed kids.
obviously not, from reading comments of others here!
When and where is the post-covid Po-tac? The Po-Co-Po-Tac? You’re all welcome to come here to LFK.
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In my school district which has about 20K students with probably 80% of them in person had at most a little over 100 students positive during any point in time and comparable number for staff, who were all required to wear masks except when eating.
Some real world experiments had some good outcomes with masks.
that hairstylist one is pretty surprising considering how close to a hairstylist you get while getting a haircut.
There’s lots of other epidemiological data supporting that masks reduce the spread of covid. Like, Mass General Hospital pointed out that their staff were less likely to get covid than the population at large (during the surge in MA, when there were a LOT of cases) and attributed it to their stringent mask policy within their buildings. Like, the ability of many Asian nations that immediately turned to universal masking to keep covid rates under control.
It’s entirely possible that mask mandates in the US were no more effective than nearby mask encouragement – what with so many people grudgingly “wearing a mask” by wearing a wide-weave knit thing below their nose and all that, side-by-side with many people choosing to properly wear real masks despite no mandate. But that’s completely separate from the question of whether masks themselves work.
(It’s relevant for public policy, of course. Maybe advertisements work better than mandates, for instance.)
I remember reading about the MO hairstylists on AO back in June when it happened. Pretty amazing.
Seems like strong circumstantial evidence that masks do in fact protect others.
Of course salons have a lot of moving air with all the hair dryers and sometimes small fans if they do nails. My stylist also has an electric dustpan. All of which probably help reduce the aerosols.
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I was around a friend one time that was wearing one of those cheap blue masks that was so threadbare that I could see his mouth.
Right. More succinctly:
The failure of mask mandates that are grudgingly not-quite-followed is not evidence against the value of masks.
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I haven’t had a cold in over a year. Colds for me are like twig’s social life. I barely remember them. But I do remember they were like clockwork. A sore throat for a day or two, bad congestion for about 5 days, bad enough that I can’t sleep, then another week of symptoms but I can sleep just fine. If I’m expected to call in sick when I have a cold post-covid, how long? Just the 2 day sore throat? The 7 days the symptoms are bad? All 2 weeks? I feel like I just don’t know.
If you’re reachable, it’s not PTO. If somebody texts me a work question while I’m on vacation, I will log in and cancel my PTO request for that day. Seriously, No Joke. I’m either working or I’m not. I don’t eff around with W-L balance. Especially, now that my office is also my home.
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so your sick days and vacation days are all rolled into PTO? Do you have more PTO than you otherwise would? At my previous job we had just PTO for everything. At my current job, there are separate sick days. I think it’s fine to expect you to take PTO if you’re sick as long as the PTO allowance is a reasonable amount to include sick days. It’s more flexible than having separate sick days.
We have permissive time off, so we don’t have vacation days, PTO, sick days, or anything else. If you need the day off and it’s not messing with what needs to get done, you take it. It’s good for this but it’s bad because you can’t bank time to get a payout when you retire/leave (which is why the company offers it — no vacation liability on the books anymore)
I wonder with those programs though, what if you’re just overworked? Then what needs to get done is always >= your time and thus you get no vacation time? Having an allotted 3-4 weeks at least makes the company come to grips with having redundancy.
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We have an expectation that people use at least 4 weeks, but I don’t know if there are consequences if managers are routinely blocking people for doing that. I technically report to someone, but I pretty much manage my own schedule and priorities because I’m a 1 person reserving team, so it’s never been an issue for me.