Hacker News Reader

What is your location?

Here, in Poland, its mostly the kids bringing infections home. I usually expect at least one week off due to sickness in early fall, and then proper flu (taking around 10 days) in december/january. This is the norm.

I remember a stark contrast with the UK where, I guess due to the climate, the kids dont get sick at all.

In my experience in the US, it's about the same. Although it seems my house doesn't get quite as sick as yours; I don't think I've ever been sick enough long enough to take 10 days off work.

Same in France. The threshold for "can go to school" is "no fever".

So you have plenty of kids sneezing and coughing as if they were in a final stage of tuberculosis and there was no tomorrow.

They are taught to sneeze in their arm (and they do it) but not coughing. So they cough as of it was the olympics again and there would be a prize for the one who coughs further.

For the record, I have two children (now students) so they did their share of spreading diseases (to home and at school)

Which is the reason I started a few years ago doing the seasonal flu shots (then covid too) and lo, no more sickness time. I'm aware they never cover 100% of the strains but seems I was in the lucky majority. Now that kids are growing up probably I'll continue, it's nice to not worry about sitting with fever at home.

It amazes me that our culture normalizes people spreading their infections.

I thought getting regularly infected with seasonal diseases keeps your immune system up-to-date against the pathogen mutations and avoids a rarer but more dangerous episode down the road.

But I guess without a serious study my belief is hard to check & validate.

It's the opposite - regularly getting infected weakens your immune system. It's not something that constantly needs to be "trained".

What we normalize is not stopping the world every time someone gets the sniffles.

What we have normalized is forcing people to work while sick, so they can make everyone else in the office sick.

So you're the one passing the cold around. Please stop doing that! We all resent it.

Yes, there was a “rebound” effect where isolation during COVID reduced herd immunity to other respiratory viruses. When people were brought back into close contact, the result was a “speed run” through three years of viruses in the space of one year. It’s a bit more complex than that but you get the gist.

I think the majority of the effect is that and confirmation bias, but I think there could be some marginal effect.

Im hybrid with days in office counted and a performance consideration. When I have used by WFH days then get sick, I 100% take it to the office.

I dont know if this surpasses the effect of fewer people in the office, but I think it is possible.

> isolation during COVID reduced herd immunity to other respiratory viruses.

Do you have any reference explaining this? As far as I know, respiratory viruses (flu, RSV, COVID-19) are difficult to develop immunity for because of their rapid evolution cycles. The quote above sounds counter-intuitive to me.

Disclaimer: I'm not even remotely a biologist, and this is a vague memory of some announcements (albeit by reputable scientific sources) a year ago.

This gist of what I remember was that viruses mutate some "percentage" of their envelope on average annually. It's somewhat predictable for more than six months into the future, which is how flu vaccines are developed and manufactured ahead of time before the next flu season.

This unpredictability accumulates, so after three years the viruses become nearly totally unpredictable, not just to vaccine manufacturers, but also to the human immune system. If you get the flu every year, each year the new flu might only be 30% different than the one before, so you have some lingering immunity to it. If you catch it every year, you'll generally get mild cases and refresh your immunity each time. If you skip three years, the viruses become 66% different, which might be sufficient to evade your immune system and give you a really bad case.

There were also a few coincidental compounding issues recently, such as particularly virulent strains of viruses such as RSV going around.

in 20 years people will still be saying lockdowns in 2020/2021 caused immunity debt.

I get a flu and COVID vaccine once a year and essentially never get anything worse than a cold.

I have young school-aged kids, and kids are cesspools of filth and pestilence.

might not be a universal thing, but covid or not there is usually a decent health and safety policy in most places that allows remote work when you are feeling symptoms of the flu.

being from a city where owning personal vehicle is too expensive and impractical, and where public transportation is "good enough" and encouraged, it is the act of commuting, whether work or not, that would have given me more anxiety.

this is what living in the city is though. i would not choose a way of working based on this alone.

If you had COVID (which you definitely had) you are now immune compromised. You can test your cell immunity to see this (CD3+CD4- and such). I had AIDS-level immunity after my infection. This resolves within 2 years, usually, unless you are constantly getting reinfected due to this lower immunity and not taking any precautions like masking.

It's not flu. I just assume anything respiratory I get from the office or when travelling is COVID and so far antigenic tests always confirmed it.

I take flu vaccine shots once a year and didn't get flu since years. Same for COVID but they don't work, I still get it at least twice a year with bad symptoms

How many Covid vaccines did you have?