After years of careful hygiene and social measures taken to fend off COVID-19, people are now experiencing life more or less as usual again—which has meant that the typical wintertime viruses we evaded for so long have come roaring back. People fell ill with COVID but also with flu and RSV, leading some public-health researchers to warn of a “tripledemic” with the strength to sicken millions. Also common, and equally burdensome, at least among families with small children: strep, pink eye, croup, stomach bugs, and one unidentifiable head cold after another, leaving empty bottles of liquid Tylenol and trash cans full of used tissues behind. All over the country, local health resources advised people that if it seemed as though everyone they knew was sick, they weren’t imagining things—just living through a time of pestilence.
There still remains, for example, a dearth of policies that would allow parents time off to care for sick children without sacrificing their own sick leave, which seemed in precious short supply this winter. And that’s if one can get any sick leave at all—as the Department of Labor currently advises (or ominously warns?), “there are no federal legal requirements for paid sick leave.”
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