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Comment by Arubis | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, I have two young kids in daycare, and everyone’s been sick more often than not since January. Frequent Covid swabs all come back negative.

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My anecdata is similar. A constant 2 week cycle of getting mildly sick, recovering, and then getting mildly sick again. Dr said there's a ton of it going around.

I'm well past the elementary school (and younger) age, but this wasn't uncommon when my kids were that age.

Like the sibling comment I've also been sick more often these last few months than I have in recent memory. Kiddo has been at daycare/preschool for a couple years now. AFAICT it's a real phenomenon.

Exact same anecdote for me. I’ve been sick every two weeks, then one week recovered, and repeat for the past 3 months or so. I’ve been sick more in 3 months than in 5 years. It’s very odd. Never tested positive.

Yep, we are also on a 2-3 week cycle. My family is currently sick in fact. We've yet to test positive for covid, ever. I'm at this weird place now where I just want to get it over with, but at this point it's like we can't catch covid even if we tried, due to the queue of other crap the kids are coming home with.

I don't think you can "get it over with" in any sort of permanent way. Antibodies acquired through vaccination or previous infection helped with Omicron, but they wane significantly over a few months. Similar things are happening with newer variants.

What you want is to provoke a T-cell response, so your body can make new antibodies as needed, and it doesn't matter if they fade.

Recently I went back in the office, and got sick within a week

Then it took a month to recover

Same as well with two kids 4 and newborn. Tons of colds coming through Preachool that aren’t Covid, according to the constant testing the school requires.

Also for those wondering there was a massive spike in RSV in early December. I would guess it infected the school and my family in days. Just unbelievably infectious, and with a baby RSV is quite scary as it’s the leading cause of infant pneumonia and is much more dangerous than people realize (we need a vaccine for RSV!)

Exact same pattern here - 2 pre-k kids, wave after wave of illness since January, still yet to see a positive covid test.

I guess it’s good that their immune systems are getting a workout, but all this illness and accompanying missed school has been a major slog.

Same here. We have had everything since December. In December, we had Covid-19, in April what seemed like the flu, and we also had different types of cold and stomach viruses. I have been almost permanently ill and tired since December. Now I feel much better! It seems we upgraded our "antivirus software". ;-)

This is very much a normal thing pre-pandemic.

Get used to it, kids are gross, do gross things, don't wash, snot everywhere, etc.

- Parent of 3

Us too. We actually pulled our toddler from daycare for the summer just to not be sick for a while. He was in school 2 of 5 weeks prior to that with the other 3 home sick. It’s exhausting.

Same situation. Child is just short of five. For last half year, she is consistently out sick at least half the time. The whole family is sick constantly. It is an exhausting and challenging time.

Half of my office is/was out with COVID. My youngest has told me that the teachers, and students, are frequently absent in the middle school because of COVID infections.

I don't think that it's impacting daycare too much but it's definitely racing through offices and schools here. (Eastern Pennsylvania)

Same except since.. September

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