brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Brin ([personal profile] brin_bellway) wrote2021-09-18 12:54 pm

(no subject)

[fairly strong cw: illness]


[Dreamwidth; Wayback) (by [personal profile] siderea)

aaaaaaaa

The main thing I'm going "aaaaaaaa" about is actually in the comments. Are you telling me that our society has been forcing adults to make tremendous sacrifices WRT their own levels of disease exposure in order to train kids' immune systems, and we may actually be harming *everyone* *including* the kids by so doing?

...okay, I know, even *that* is giving too much credit: I'm almost certain that congregate schooling was not *intentionally* designed as a disease propagation method to give kids as many antibodies as possible while they're still young (read: can physically bounce back better + have few responsibilities). It was probably only obvious in hindsight, and even then only to people who, as Siderea puts it, believe in germ theory.

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†what happens in school doesn't stay in school. especially if you're a parent, but not entirely: I serve a lot of kids at work (they mostly stayed away in 2020, but they were there before and they're coming back now), and of course the chain of transmission can also go child-->parent-->other-adults.
thedarlingone: black cat in front of full moon in dark blue sky (Default)

[personal profile] thedarlingone 2021-09-19 04:44 am (UTC)(link)
Well, in the interests of fairness, my workplace is a third-party-run call center with departments contracted to Large Telecom among other companies; I don't know if Large Telecom is forcing its own internal workers back onsite yet.

On the immune-system-atrophy hypothesis, as someone who has lived in wildly varying levels of isolation from other humans, I've never noticed a difference. Granted I'm not someone who pays super close attention, since my immune system has always been pretty solid -- my breakdowns come from overwork, stress, and trying to tough out cold weather in insufficiently warm jackets, not disease. But the common thread between the major respiratory illnesses I have come down with in my life (those being the ones I'm reasonably sure were germ/virus-related) was simply being around large groups of other people in enclosed spaces -- attending daily Mass during flu season, attending college classes ditto, working on a call floor with about 150 other people packed into it.