People in England who have a cough or a cold will be advised to stay home and avoid contact with others under new government guidance which will be issued on Friday.
The legal requirement to self-isolate after a positive covid test was scrapped in February.
However, the new guidance will recommend that people remain at home if they feel unwell and to resume everyday activities only when they feel better or their temperature has subsided.
According to GB News:
After Friday, people who have a positive Covid-19 test are being advised to “try to” stay at home and avoid contact with other people for five days, which is when they are most infectious.
Those who are positive, or have symptoms, and need to leave home will be urged to wear masks, avoid crowded places and stay away from people with weakened immune systems.
Children who are unwell and have a high temperature are being advised to stay home and avoid contact with other people where they can.
They can go back to school, college or childcare when they no longer have a high temperature and they are well enough to attend, the Government said.
The advice forms part of the Government’s Living with Covid plans, which have been updated to include information on who will still be eligible for free Covid-19 tests.
Speaking yesterday Health Secretary Sajid Javid said:
“Thanks to our plan to tackle Covid we are leading the way in learning to live with the virus. We have made enormous progress but will keep the ability to respond to future threats including potential variants.
Vaccines remain our best defence and we are now offering spring boosters to the elderly, care home residents and the most vulnerable – please come forward to protect yourself, your family and your community.”
What if someone chooses not to stay at home though? Since the dawn of industrialisation people have gone to work when they’ve had the lurgy.
If someone has a runny nose or a bit of a cough, which millions of us do at this time of year and through the Winter, yet chooses to go to work anyway, as we’ve always done, what then?
Will employers be encouraged to tell them to go home? What if that person works in a job where he/she cannot work from home? Will they be paid and by whom?
As usual, not a peep from opposition party’s or the media. It’s not the place of any government to tell people when they should and shouldn’t go to work or when they should or shouldn’t mix with others.
A lecturer at Salford University told me many years ago that people should never loan their freedoms to their government, no matter the crisis, because governments never hand them back.
She was right.
