Well, at lot of times you are contagious before realizing you are sick.
here’s a dilema, I have a real important globally attended meeting in the US for all of next week. I live in China which is experiencing a SARS outbreak. I am asymptomatic (eg, do not have symptoms). Should I not get on the plane because it’s possible that out of 1.4 billion people living in China, I might one of the several hundred infected?
I don’t personally know of even one person that is infected. i work for a multinational with thousands of employees across Asia and not one has been infected.
There are few hard and fast rules as to whether a sick person should stay home or not. Ordinarily, it’s a good idea, but if a project is really urgent, then it would arguably be better for the company if an employee were to show up sick – ESPECIALLY if this person is in a critically important position.
This sort of thing happens all the time in tech companies. Often, you’ll have one or two employees with esoteric domain knowledge, and their absence at a critical stage in a project can set it back by weeks, if not longer. That’s one reason why you can’t simply legislate that these people should stay home. It’s not necessarily the best thing for the company, or for the individual.
JThunder, read the OP. IF you have a position so important that being sick can’t stop you from working then (in my perfect world) you would have to get a license to leave the house sick. It would also be a good idea to warn everybody you work with that you are sick so they can keep their distance if possible.
BTW, these extra costs (license fees and fines) would slightly offset the damage to the economy due to the lower medicine and tissue sales. Not much, but every bit helps.
Again, I know I’m fantasizing, but if we spread the word maybe we can cut it down a bit. I’m thinking about sending out a chain email.
About half of the employees in our office are sick now, thanks to the first rude jerk that wouldn’t take two sick days. Yeah, he’s kind of important and he’s very busy. And since he is so busy in my world he might still be allowed to go to work. Except I really don’t think he would be able to prove to a judge that he is THAT important. Actually, it’s not just the people in this office that are sick. The illness is spreading all around the whole building. There are probably 100 people sick in this building. The disease came into the building from one person. Don’t know if that was the guy in my office, but someone did it. See how the cold spreads? Now the 100 people take their colds home and infect maybe one family member. Now let’s be optimistic and say 125 are infected. Those then go to their offices and schools and infect even more people. If this ONE person would have stayed home (with his sick family) hundreds of people (or more) would have been saved the agony of illness.
I think you’re missing the point. This isn’t as simple as identifying critical people in advance, so that they can be granted these licenses. Sometimes, it’s a matter of circumstances, and circumstances can change very rapidly.
For example, what if there are three people in a given position, and two of them are sick? Should the third be required to apply for a license, so that he can come to work if he falls ill as well? Or what if two of the employees go on vacation. Should the third person be required, by force of law, to obtain a license or else?
Furthermore, what if you’re an engineer who has just gotten up to speed on a piece of new technology? This sort of thing happens all the time. If you’re the only employee with experience in this particular matter, should you be forced to obtain this mythical license ASAP, just in case you should happen to fall sick sometime within the week?
Oh, please. One could just as easily argue that the added bureaucracy would severely aggravate the economic damage. After all, if a company is forced to spend valuable manpower on paperwork – including proof that the employee’s work is critical enough to warrant the risk of spreading infection – everytime one’s duties or skill set changes (which happens with remarkable frequency in high-tech industries), then this could easily cripple a company’s performance.
<<Sigh>> Look, nobody’s denying that it’s usually a good idea to stay home if you’re sick. However, this does not mean that we should enforce that rule with the full weight of the law, forcing companies to prove that a given employee needs to show up for work anyway.
Your example is purely anecdotal, and is not sufficient to warrant any legislation against sick people showing up for work.
So the policeman is going to be put in the position of making medical diagnosis on the street? What’s to stop him from ticketing the innocent alergy sufferer, or person going through heroin withdrawal?
For that matter, is the law only going to cover classic cold and flu symptoms the (non-doctor) policeman could easily indentify? Maybe we should give all the cops little blood testing kits.
But maybe more importantly, you seem to be talking about people who have at least some options as far as staying home. And fair enough, they should be encouraged to.
But there are millions of people in low-paying, no-benefit (concievably no sick time) jobs who get told “I don’t care if your sick, come to work or you’re fired.”
Given that these same employers may very well be ignoring the laws dircted at THEM (overtime, working conditions etc.) and can get away with it because their employees are desperate, I don’t think they’d have a problem with “I don’t care if you’re sick and might get arrested, come to work or you’re fired.”
Oh, yeah, and "send a relative out for tissues and medicine’ or for that matter, food? What if you’re all alone in the world? Or what if you’re family members are two and three, and they’re sick too?
No, I amire your goals and I think there’s a lot we could do to as a society to dicourage all this germ sharing, but passing a law against it is not one of those things.
bete- who is only here posting this now becasue she is home from work with a contagious disease
So the policeman is going to be put in the position of making medical diagnosis on the street? What’s to stop him from ticketing the innocent alergy sufferer, or person going through heroin withdrawal?
For that matter, is the law only going to cover classic cold and flu symptoms the (non-doctor) policeman could easily indentify? Maybe we should give all the cops little blood testing kits.
But maybe more importantly, you seem to be talking about people who have at least some options as far as staying home. And fair enough, they should be encouraged to.
But there are millions of people in low-paying, no-benefit (concievably no sick time) jobs who get told “I don’t care if your sick, come to work or you’re fired.”
Given that these same employers may very well be ignoring the laws dircted at THEM (overtime, working conditions etc.) and can get away with it because their employees are desperate, I don’t think they’d have a problem with “I don’t care if you’re sick and might get arrested, come to work or you’re fired.”
Oh, yeah, and "send a relative out for tissues and medicine’ or for that matter, food? What if you’re all alone in the world? Or what if you’re family members are two and three, and they’re sick too?
No, I amire your goals and I think there’s a lot we could do to as a society to dicourage all this germ sharing, but passing a law against it is not one of those things.
bete- who is only here posting this now becasue she is home from work with a contagious disease
I only wish I could stay home when I’m ill. I only stay home when I’m very sick, too sick to do my job. That is because I have 10 days for the entire year, plus 3 “personal time off” days. (I technically have two additional days but if I use them I am written up for it.) They go damned fast. I used to never get sick but I get sick all the time now and I think it’s because of where I work. We all come in even when we’re too sick to be there because we would all end up fired if we took that much time off. Plus, the whole money thing. One month I got really sick (using all my sick days for that entire year) and only had $400 for the entire month due to being sick. That was a huge financial setback for me, plus I was worried out of my mind about getting sick again that year.
I agree, we should stay home, but we should not be penalized for it, and we should receive pay. (Even if it’s only a percentage of our normal pay.)
Another one who doesn’t think it a practical idea (though the intention is good, I guess). Because of a sudden drop in temperature and heavy rain, the last few days a lot of people around here have a slight cough. Some have it worse than others; I have a very slight irritation that makes me cough once every couple of hours. For all I know I could have the beginnings of a contagious disease (i.e. a cold). I feel perfectly o.k. otherwise. Does this mean that I must stay at home? If so, that means that roughly 50% of the people have to stay at home currently. That hardly seems a realistic expectation.
Furthermore I don’t think my employer would allow me to stay at home with only a very minor cough. If you can change his mind, be my guest.
If you’re only talking about serious symptoms (your OP is not entirely clear on this matter), you will not catch a large part of contagious diseases which, as was mentioned before, may already be present without showing themselves. I’m pretty sure some of those coughs I’ve heard lately will develop into a cold.
My personal advice is that you should take adequate prevention yourself. If I sense a possible beginning of a cold I try to go to bed early and eat healthy. Usually this will nip it in the bud. Most colds get you because your resistance is down. YMMV
Also, there’s a difference between going to work and going out. You’re in a lot more danger sitting in a room with someone generating a cloud of moist cold germs, than walking past them in the street.
For that matter, it can’t it be healthier for someone with a cold to get out in the fresh air for a walk?
OTOH I read the OP’s suggestion about the law as parallel to ‘I think all people who queue jump should be shot’; as a venting, not a serious suggestion.
Well, he subsequently tried to argue that people who must come to work should obtain some sort of government license. To my mind, that indicates far more than just “venting.”
Honestly I don’t want the government to butt into our affairs unless it has to. But since we aren’t capable of caring about other people enough to quarantine ourselves the government is probably the only possibility of us ever doing so. Of course convincing the government to enforce this law would be much more difficult than convincing the public that it’s smart to stay at home when they are sick.
They are both practically impossible, in the short term. In 50 years or so? Who knows? If we start spreading the word, and if we can convince bosses to force their sick employees to stay home (without penalty) then eventually it might be considered rude to leave the house when sick.
You still don’t get it. It’s not just a matter of convincing the government to enforce such a law. The bigger problem is that such a law is bound to create far more problems than it can ever hope to solve.