Covid-tests and culpability...
(summary: some guy on AITA reddit saying his partner got hospitalised for a respiratory illness in January. 13 days later, completely in line with CDC advice, she restarted social activities that weren’t banned at the time. He later dumps his fiancee for giving everyone covid despite the fact he has no evidence of this, and there was no guidance to suggest what she did was wrong)
From a medical point of view, I want to correct any misconceptions:
guidelines change all the time. In the UK, for example, we’ve always been expected back at work 7 days after we first got covid symptoms, as long as we were fever-free in the 48 hours before going back to work, and the cough was getting better.
The CDC’s reccommendations are: 3 days with no fever and Respiratory symptoms have improved (e.g. cough, shortness of breath) and 10 days since symptoms first appeared.
this woman spent 13 days off work and 5 days in hospital. By most standards, she would have cleared the CDC’s recommendations and certainly would not have been expected to stay home later.
We aren’t sure how long people remain infectious - even my occupational health consultant admitted that the time we tell people to take off is a bit arbitrary. But people have to go back to life at some point - you can’t just make everyone take an extra fortnight or month off just in case.
This was also at a time when we didn’t know a lot about the illness, and guidelines were more lax in a lot of places. If guidelines are later found to be wrong - that’s life. We work on the best info we have at the time, but this changes. You can’t blame someone for not following today’s guidelines before they existed. That’s not how this works.
you can’t judge someone’s actions in hindsight given how much has changed in this time period. we’re talking about Jan/Feb - there were relatiively few cases in the US or UK at the time, and the risk of catching it was thought low. Hell, in my hospital we were only allowed to test people who’d been to hotspots like Wuhan, with special permission from the microbiology team. He’s looking at it through the lens of today, and allocating certainty that was not present at the time.
She had positive antibodies ages afterwards - there’s no guarantee that that particular illness in January was Covid - technically the flu was a lot more prevalent in most places at the time. Statistically, it’s more likely to have been flu. It may have been covid, but she could equally have caught it later and carried it asymptomatically.
At that time (Jan/Feb) a lot of official advice was to carry on as normal or to practice good hygeine as long as you were symptom free. If it was wrong for her to go to church, then it was wrong for the church to be open at all in the pandemic. In reality, a lot of decisions could have been made to decrease social interaction earlier, in a lot of countries. But it wasn’t - and we all probably share some collective blame for that, but most of the responsibility belongs to the leaders who should have been making those decisions.
This guy telling his fiancee to stay home for another 2 weeks after all her symptoms disappeared is completely not evidence based - as in, no official sources were recommending this approach. This isn’t about him telling her to follow the law or curent guidance, he literally pulled an arbitrary time figure out of his butt and then got mad that she didn’t do whatever he said.
Would it be better for people who have just been sick with covid symptoms to stay home longer if they can? Sure, it probably wouldn’t hur to make sure it’s more likely to be out of your system. But that’s by no means law or official guidance, nor should people be punished for not staying home longer than recommended.
You really shouldn’t assume that she was the one who gave everone covid. She could just as easily have caught it from the same person who made everyone else at the church sick - who may not even have had symptoms. It’s an AH move to hear other people tested positive and immediately assume your SO is the one who got everyone sick and needs to be punished. It suggests he doesn’t like or respect his ex partner much, since he immediately thinks the worst of her.
It takes a special kind of AH to think ‘huh, I think the pastor’s wife was pressuring her to come back’, but then still lay the full blame on your GF for giving into that pressure. If I feel my SO is being pressured, I’m mad on their behalf, I’m not mad at them for struggling with it. If you think your GF shouldn’t have gone back, then you should hold your religious leaders accountable for not protecting the vulnerable by cutting social acitvities and not letting people stay off sick. There are a lot of complex decisions that go into how people have navigated lockdown - whether they followed the rules, or not.
It actually seems that he’s a lot more mad that she didn’t do what he said, and his focus is very much on the fact that he feels he was ‘right’. This comes across as being all about control, rather than any genuine care for his partner or others.
Lots of people get sick in a pandemic, it’s hard not to spread illness. We try to do our best, but people can still get sick from us, and that’s just how it is, living in a pandemic. Following guidance helps, but nobody is perfect, and ostracising everyone who messes up isn’t actually gonna fix anything. Hey, I’m a doctor, I see people make mistakes on a regular basis, that’s just life.
I kind of feel that I shouldn’t have to point it out to a churchgoer, but people are allowed to make mistakes and ask for forgiveness. Apparently the aim isn’t to talk to people about how to do better, it’s to have a go at them and then ostracise them for things largely outside of their control. There’s something hilariously unchristian about his conduct with his SO, and I’d rather be an atheist than buy into whatever form of Christianity he’s supposedly buying into.
She didn’t make a mistake IMHO - she followed regulations.
But if she did make a mistake - is that how you treat your SO when they’ve made a mistake and feel ashamed and bad about what happened? Belittle them, make it all about you (’I told you so), then cut them off because they should apparently have listened to you? Ignore their sincere repentance? Use this as an excuse to be outraged and sanctimonious?
This may come as a shock to some but: SOs aren’t perfect and people mess up. If your response to a partner making a small mistake (as opposed to being a chronically abusive, toxic person) is dumping them because they didn’t do what you want, then you’re really not mature enough to be in a relationship, let alone engaged. If you’re in a relationship, there will be times when your SO messes up - and if they are a decent person they’ll feel bad and try to do better. You can encourage them to be the better person next time, but why would you want them to feel even more terrible? Why would you punish them for something they can’t fix? Why would you go out of your way to hurt them? Don’t you love this person? And is that how you’d like to be treated when you inevitably make mistakes, too?
We are going to see a lot more stories like this - people mad about others not quarantining properly or breaking rules, or being human. Please don’t be the kind of sanctimonious AH who holds people to some impossible standard.
Sure, we can be mad when someone blatantly doesn’t follow important rules, that’s human. But we shouldn’t just turn this into another stick to beat everyone with - because that says as much about us as it does about them.
