LA Times: Got COVID? Doctors warn powering through it — even from home — can worsen health toll

Arnie Pye

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Link : https://www.latimes.com/california/...ough-covid-sleep-rest-infection-test-positive

Jaime Seltzer from MEAction is quoted a few times.

More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, when Dr. Anthony Fauci tested positive for the coronavirus, his federal agency announced that he would “continue to work from his home.”

So did U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who announced on Twitter that after testing positive, “I plan to work remotely.” And so did San Francisco Mayor London Breed, whose office announced she would conduct meetings from home after testing positive.

As vaccines and new treatments have eased some of the alarm around a COVID-19 diagnosis, continuing to work — but from home — has become a familiar practice among professionals who can do their jobs remotely. Fauci was vaccinated and boosted and said he was experiencing mild symptoms, like other officials who said they would stay on the job from home.

Physicians caution, however, that rest is an important part of weathering a COVID-19 infection. Plugging away from home is better than putting others at risk of getting infected, but it can still strain the immune system, worsening the toll of a COVID infection, experts say.

...

The pressure to keep working with COVID — even if it’s from home — has also troubled labor and disability advocates who see it as normalizing working through illness.

When prominent officials test positive and say they will keep working from home, “it is a way of saying, ‘I am still a powerful person who is able to continue doing my job,’ ” said Jaime Seltzer, director of scientific and medical outreach at #MEAction, the Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Action Network. If the goal was to craft a public message based on the best evidence, “we would say that when you become ill, you should be resting.”

...

As of February, roughly a tenth of workers surveyed said they had gone to work with COVID-19 symptoms or after being exposed to the virus because they couldn’t afford to take time off, Kaiser Family Foundation surveys found. Working through COVID symptoms or exposure was much more common — 29% said they had done so — among workers with household incomes under $40,000. Only 6% of workers from households with higher incomes said the same, the surveys showed.

No wonder over a million people have died of Covid in the USA.
 
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