Opinion | When I recently caught COVID a colleague wrote to me implying I should be back in the office because the virus should now be treated like a cold, and we don’t stop the economy for colds. Is that right? kirstinferguson latest gotaminute column
Everyone in my family has COVID at the moment. We’re very lucky in that none of us are seriously ill, but all of us are feeling poorly. On a personal note, I feel better than I did a week ago, but don’t think I’ll be ‘back to normal’ for a while.
In truth, there could be many reasons. They might have watched too many YouTube videos about global conspiracies. They might have been having a terrible day and said something they now regret. They might just be an unpleasant, thoughtless person. But I keep coming back to this idea of “stopping the economy”.
‘By taking sick leave you might be depriving ‘the economy’ of your labour, but you’re also reducing the likelihood of infection in your office.′ If we wanted to be unnecessarily generous here, we might assume that your work critic knows all this but maintains that your ‘bad’ decision has a small but adverse affect on one tiny part of “the economy”. And that when many people make that same decision, there’s a large problem. But even if this is true, how can they be so certain about your particular decision?
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