I’m supposed to go to my daughters for turkey day. I’ve been sick for about a week.
I completely lost my voice and have been coughing up some nasty…stuff. I never had a fever, that I’m aware of.
My daughter finally wants to learn to cook, so I hate to not be there, but she also has a 7 month old that I would hate to make sick. There is a chance that I actually got sick from last weeks visit with the baby though since both she and my daughter had mild cold symptoms when I was there. My sore throat started the following day.
Doctors have told me, in the past when I had swine flu, that the likelihood of contagion was much lower once obvious symptoms have passed, which makes sense since the pathogen is not going to be passed on as easily if its media are lessened - less spittle or snot flying around, basically.
However, unless the illness you have is really serious, there’s no point keeping away from babies. Babies are going to get ill anyway now and then and the only way their immune system will improve is by exposure to mild pathogens. Obviously you should let your daughter know, but there’s no point in being over-protective.
If you visited and then got a cold the next day, chances are exceedingly slim that you got sick from that visit - most colds are caused by viruses which need about a week to be fruitful and multiply inside you before your body makes a fuss about them and you get symptoms. So you want to find someone you were hanging out with a *week *before you got sick to pin the blame on.
This isn’t foolproof, but the rules of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit where my daughter lived her first three months were that you could come visit if you had the sniffles, but you had to wear a mask and gloves (as well as, of course, scrubbing your hands and arms really well before you came in, but that was required no matter how you felt.) If you had an elevated temperature, though, you were asked to stay home, as you were considered too risky for the mask and gloves to be sufficient protection for the babies.
When I asked why, one of the doctors told me that sick-without-fever was more likely to be a bacteria, and they could give the babies antibiotics if they got sick, but sick-with-a-fever was more likely to be a virus, and there are not many effective but safe antivirals. I’m not sure I buy it (since colds are viral, but often don’t come with fevers), but he has the MD after his name and I don’t.
My daughter’s school system, likewise, will let parents send coughing sneezing germ factories to school, but a temp elevated above 100 (which isn’t even a fever yet, that’s still within normal limits for kids) and they can’t come back until it’s down for 24 hours, whether they have any other symptoms or not.
I’d suggest calling your daughter and asking her what she’d like. She’s the one who has to decide if learning to cook today instead of next week is worth the risk of sitting up at night with a screaming snot filled baby. (If it were I, I’d say sure, come over, but please stop and pick up a bottle of hand sanitizer and a paper mask from the drugstore, and I’d make us all wash our hands like we had OCD.)