Stay Home

Dear Sick People,
Please stay home.  Please don’t go to work where there are people who are trying to make their ends meet, and who need the income every single day brings.  If you work with the general public, please don’t come in sick and infect the rest of us.  We don’t want to get what you have.  We don’t want to go into a gas station, a department store, or a pizza place to run our errands or take care of business and come away with some type of sickness.
If you are feeling okay, but your kids are sick, please don’t send them to school.  It’s kind of like work. There’s a bunch of people there.  They are trapped inside a building, and even worse, a small classroom, with your sick kid.  They don’t have the luxury of getting to leave for clean air.  They aren’t given the option of taking a class somewhere else.  They are there to learn, and your sick kid is invading their space with nasty germs.  Because if you send your kid to school sick, I’ll bet you didn’t even teach them how to cover their cough or to cough into the cloth.  Which means when they cough, they are spraying mucus and saliva all over the classroom, and it’s landing on the not-sick kids.
Stay home and get some rest.  Keep your kids home so they can rest.  Just do what you need to do to get healthy.  Because coming into the workplace or stores, or school when you are sick is not the right thing to do.  It is not the nice thing to do.  It’s not thoughtful or courteous.  It’s down right rude.
Believe it or not, there are people in these buildings with compromised immune systems.  People who can die from your germs.  Yes, I said people who could die from your germs.  Because they could.
People who have compromised immune systems can look perfectly healthy and even work!  But they can also die from being exposed to specific illnesses, and you, coming to work sick, can endanger them.  So please, once again, stay home.  Even if you are one of those who need to make your ends meet.  Even if you’re like me, and feel like you should be at work because it’s “just the sniffles“… do everyone in your community a favor, and stay home.