Over the last week, a number of my co-workers have tested positive for covid. As of yesterday morning, I thought I had gotten lucky, and avoided infection this time around--I tested negative on Wednesday and again on Friday. But then, last night I started having the sniffles and a sore throat, and so I had someone drop off a test for me this morning. The results just came back positive. Lucky me!
The last time I had covid, I had to miss weeks of work because I have lupus and am considered immunocompromised. According to the nurse who managed my case at my company's employee health division, that means I shed more of the virus, and can more easily spread it to other people. After the last time I got sick, I started wearing a mask at all times while at work and in public. I had hoped to avoid catching it again, and having to miss a lot of work, which put me in a difficult financial position at the time. I am the only person in my office who wears a mask all the time.
I hope I don't have to miss a lot of work again--I have heard that employees who have tried to collect workers comp had their claims rejected because they could not "prove" they caught covid at work. And I don't have enough PTO (paid time off) to cover having to miss weeks of work. I sent a message to my practice manager and to employee health--we will see what they tell me. I don't know if the current strains of covid floating around have the same effects on immunocompromised individuals as the ones that were present in the community the last time I got sick.
This time around, my sister, who has COPD due to smoking, and now has to be on oxygen, is staying with me since she can't work and has had to apply for disability. My having covid is quite dangerous for her. While she has been an absolute pain in my ass since she moved here (a whole other story beyond the scope of this diary), she does not deserve to contract what could be a life-threatening illness. She has already been in the hospital for pneumonia this year, and still has not fully recovered. I texted her and told her she better be wearing a mask at all times while at home, and that she and I need to stay away from each other as much as possible. Her room is on the on the opposite end of my mobile home, and I put a fan in the window of my room and turned it backwards so it will pull air out of the room and vent it outside. Hopefully, that will help protect her and the other members of my household.
But even though you may mask yourself, it does not mean it will fully protect you, especially if you are in an environment where a lot of non-masking people are spreading it around--like my employer, who stopped requiring employees and patients to wear masks once the pandemic officially ended last year. Maybe I caught it when I pulled my mask down to eat lunch at my desk one day, or maybe I touched a keyboard or mouse an infected person touched and unconsciously touched my face later. Who knows? But the more unmasked, infected people there are in a building, the more likely it is that infectious droplets will be in the air and on the surfaces they have been around. Remember that not everybody who is infected will show any symptoms--and while I voluntarily tested on my own without being told to do so after I learned I had been exposed, most people are not going to test unless they have symptoms--and you can still spread covid even if you're asymptomatic. There is no way of knowing just how many people in my office currently have covid.
I wonder why, given the number of cases there are in the office, everybody who has been exposed to the ones who are currently covid positive have not been required to start testing?
And since the pandemic ended, the CDC no longer tracks transmission rates across the country, so there is no way of getting an accurate count of the number of cases of covid there are across the country. All I can say is that in my neck of the woods, we have been seeing a number of patients cancel their appointments and procedures than usual lately because they say they have covid. I looked around for some data that would perhaps shed some light on whether or not the number of cases in the local area have been rising lately--the only recent data I was able to find was published at the New York Times on the number of deaths and hospitalizations. And that was from the first of the year on a page that is no longer being updated.
But my question is this--why aren't masks just treated as a standard precaution in all healthcare settings? It is known that when the majority of staff and patients are masking, that it not only helps prevent the spread of covid, but many other respiratory infections as well. This would help to protect medically fragile patients and would cut down on the number of employee absences--we are already so understaffed it is all we can do to keep up with the workload. I am sure this is true in many other medical practices across the country as well.
Why don't healthcare employers want to take this small step to protect patients, employees, their families and communities from infectious diseases? Does it cost more to provide employees with masks than it does to have the workflow in a medical office disrupted for weeks due to employee absences? Or have the anti-masking MAGA types so poisoned the idea of wearing a mask, they fear the backlash they would receive if they required everyone to wear them every time they come to the doctor's office?
I am interested in everybody else's opinion on this--should masks be required in all healthcare settings, even though the covid pandemic is officially over?