Should I still isolate myself after a positive test? Is it ok to do my own shopping (with a mask) or should I call someone? Do I still wait for a negative test or simply to be free of symptoms? Since people around me don’t really talk about Covid anymore and my country doesn’t have any guidelines in place, I’d be interested in your takes. I don’t wanna be a d*ck to others but would also rather not overshoot and lock myself up at home for two weeks like in the early days. (I hope this doesn’t count as asking for medical advice.)
Edit: Thanks y’all. Guess I just needed to hear that even though everyone has been talking of “after Covid”, the situation hasn’t fundamentally changed despite our lives having normalized. I’ll be cancelling plans and staying home.
Should I still isolate myself after a positive test?
Yes. You can still infect others and others can still have long covid reactions or complications.
Is it ok to do my own shopping (with a mask) or should I call someone?
No, because that is not isolation. The vast majority of supermarkets these days do parking lot pick up or even home delivery
Do I still wait for a negative test or simply to be free of symptoms?
According to the CDC, you can end isolation after a negative test. I would strongly encourage after TWO negative tests because the home testers are far from perfect. The last time I had covid I tested after my symptoms were “mostly gone” and once I had a negative morning test I then did an evening test to confirm.
But, above all: Even if you refuse to acknowledge that covid is serious, you can go a long way by treating it like the flu. If you are sick, don’t go out in public. Don’t cough on people or sneeze on people. And if you are at all concerned you are sick, wear a mask indoors to avoid spreading it to others.
Why would it be any different than before? Some of the answers here range from depressing to terrifying.
I know people whose health and lives are being threatened by Covid, directly and indirectly, as we speak. Infectious disease continues to be infectious. Do what we all learned to do.
Seriously.
Many people seem to be treating it differently now because the average person who catches it has milder symptoms than a couple years ago. The potential for long-term consequences seems to be left out of the conversation.
It’s not even long-term consequences. Immunodepressed people still exist.
But yeah, long term consequences, too.
People shouldn’t be thinking if they can start treating Covid like a cold or a flu ,they should be thinking about using what they learned from Covid when they get a cold or a flu instead.
I would definitely isolate, it’s still dangerous. My friends mom died about 2 weeks ago from Covid. It’s not super difficult, you can order your shopping in and Amazon brings everything else.
I know you said your country doesn’t have guidelines, but if you’d like to follow the CDC guidelines they can be found here https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/isolation.html tl;dr is yes you should isolate
Get paxlovid from a doctor. It reduces the chance of long COVID.
And have them clear you of any serious risks.
Then isolate for 5 days, or whatever the doctor tells you.
You may still have symptoms after that. Wearing a mask isn’t a terrible idea if so. No one around you wants to see you coughing after they know you just had COVID.
It never went away. It’s always been here. You should still be behaving the same way you were behaving 2 years ago.
I do not behave the way I was two years ago, nor do other people, both in private and in public (Where I live, seeing someone wear a facemask has become the exception. Big concerts have been taken place for a while, etc.). Because of that (together with the subject not coming up a lot in news and conversation anymore, masks and rapid tests going on sale, … ), I had come to the conclusion that the situation had generally relaxed. Am I wrong? At the beginning of this, I was anxious another major outbreak would be imminent, but nothing horrible seemed to happen, so I sort of lowered my guard. (Took a test when I had a sore throat or before meeting certain people, sometimes wore a mask when on particularly crowded trains, but otherwise started to live more or less like ‘before’.) Is Covid still a big deal and I sort of missed it?
Early waves had extremely high ICU/death rates because it killed off the most vulnerable.
That combined with vaccines reduced ICU/death rates, but they are still present. Infection rates have only ever been going up.
For POLITICALLY motivated reasons, not for public safety reasons, most areas have stopped collecting data, concealing infection, ICU, and death rates related the COVID, making it look like things have subsided, but we dont know, because we arent maintaining the reporting systems.
At present, I believe there are 3 new worry-some variants. They are EXTREMELY infectious, compared to earlier strains.
There is also a disturbing trend in the newer variants that they don’t go straight for the respiratory system. You get infected, it incubates in some focused area of your body, you get a little sick for a day or 2, it continues to fortify its presence in the body for a week or 2, and then you get slammed with the full blown covid symptoms for a few weeks.
That means the new strains are spreading without symptoms for a MUCH greater period of time, and the Long Covid effects of those strains are more severe.
Here is a good metaphor. If Ukraine just got bored of Russia’s invasion and decided that they were just going to return to their life as it was before Russia invaded, does that mean that the Russian invasion is over?
People just decided they were sick of masks and social distancing, and decided that it was over… but its not. Covid is now near endemic, and it is mutating at the alarming pace you would expect from Covid at endemic levels. Its only a matter of time until strains that REALLY go after the heart and the liver as well as the lungs surface, and when that happens, it will make Wave 1 of the pandemic look like child’s play.
I’m a little worried now.
When my kid got the Covid-19 recently, they stayed home from school, I worked from home, the other family members just masked at work/school or work in very depopulated office so went in. None of us got sick or got anyone else sick. But now kid has to somehow make up a week of school because even though for 3 of the school days they were well enough to do the work, the school doesn’t have any zoom feed or allowance for sick days.
Schools are far too based on attendance, and often legally can only count kids with a butt in their seat at school. Even into college, progress is based more on appearance than ability.
It leads to crappy teaching, and draconian absence policies.
To be fair, forcing kids into school drastically cuts down on child abuse. So there is a logic behind it, just taken a bit too far.
