How does the sick season actually start?
October 18, 2018 4:17 PM   Subscribe

Three days ago, my toddler was fine. Almost overnight, he and all 14 of his daycare pals have coughs and runny noses. I know how stuff spreads once it gets into a place like that. But how does it actually get in?

He is actually coming off his longest illness-free stretch since starting daycare. His last cold was early May :-)
posted by ficbot to Health & Fitness (18 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
In my experience with working with children, either parents send a kid to school sick/with minor symptoms or daycare workers come to work sick. I’m convinced that both things happen in the U.S. because working adults do not have enough paid time off to care for themselves and their children.
posted by corey flood at 4:28 PM on October 18, 2018 [34 favorites]


Grocery stores, malls, buses, stuff that parents come into contact with but doesn’t infect them, aerosolized particulate matter in any public space, relatives smooching kids, etc.

How doesn’t it get in is maybe a better question, there is no shortage of disease transmission vectors for toddlers, imo.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:30 PM on October 18, 2018 [11 favorites]


Another very likely option is, "someone's older sibling got it from school."

This is one of the problems with an economy that demands two full-time-job parents and doesn't provide sick leave, or doesn't provide enough of it to actually not go to work when one of the kids is sick.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 4:32 PM on October 18, 2018 [9 favorites]


People can easily be vectors for illness without showing symptoms so they may feel ok (at least at the start) and bring in something to people who may be more susceptible (young children, weakened immune systems, etc).
posted by acidnova at 4:33 PM on October 18, 2018 [12 favorites]


As a working parent, I’m not going to keep my kids home from daycare until they are actually sick. Which means that, occasionally, I will send what I thought were healthy kids to daycare only to get a call early afternoon that they woke up from nap with a fever or whatever.

There’s no way to insulate against that, unfortunately. Kids can pick up a cold anywhere and then spread it around before anyone notices.
posted by lydhre at 5:27 PM on October 18, 2018 [12 favorites]


My friends’ toddler’s first cold came on with ridiculous suddenness (like, went from nothing to sounding slightly stuffy to rivers of snot in 45 minutes) roughly 8 hours after her dad caught her licking the cart at the grocery store. If I hadn’t been there to witness it I wouldn’t have believed a cold could progress that fast.
posted by deludingmyself at 5:42 PM on October 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


It's not a hermetically sealed cryo-chamber. Kid wants to press all the elevator buttons on the way in the building; kid starts shedding viral particles three hours later. Fomites are everywhere.
posted by basalganglia at 6:06 PM on October 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


I also had a friends kid get instant sick after a grocery kart licking. Was more like half a day but yeah.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:06 PM on October 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


As the parent of two small ones, I... don‘t really understand the question. Cooties are everywhere. Kids lick All The Things. Then they get stuffy noses. You can‘t keep kids at home with just stuffy noses (else you‘d not be able to hold down a job for, like, half a year at a time while they go through multiple repeats of this). Kids go to daycare. Get licked by other kids.

Hey presto!

More thoughts:
I once talked with a company that produces flu meds, and they told me that while healthy childfree adults max out at one or two colds per year, kids have an absurdly higher number (I think 5 to ten?). They‘ve also been shown to harbour up to five different types of rhinoviruses simultaneously. (I‘m just a layperson, though, so don‘t take my word for it).

That helped me deal with the endless cycle of sick kid -> sick mommy -> sick kid. Kids are impressive disease vectors.

The other thing to consider is that most moms you know are stressed and overworked, so their immune systems aren‘t up to handling the barrage that happens between ages 2,5 to 4,5. So they end up spreading the cold around with other moms. And so on.
posted by Omnomnom at 11:30 PM on October 18, 2018 [13 favorites]


I work at a university and in the last few weeks we have gone full tilt into everyone getting a share of the colds that students bring from all over the world when they come back for the new term. I guess this probably has a knock-on effect in the local community and there are probably other versions of this as people move around.
posted by biffa at 3:05 AM on October 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


Best answer: Here's a summary of potentially relevant research about why there's a distinct flu season in winter. Basically, the idea is that flu viruses (and, presumably, other viruses) are always hanging around; we just become way more susceptible to them in wintertime for as-yet-only-theorized reasons. Theories include:
1. flu peaks in winter because people spend more time indoors, with the windows closed, breathing each other's air;
2. the darkness (i.e. lack of Vitamin D and melatonin) and cold of winter weaken our immune systems, making us more susceptible to the virus;
3. the flu virus
[and potentially other viruses transmitted through droplets] thrives in the cold, dry air of winter, but suffers in the warm, humid air of summer;
4. winter flu is ushered in by changes in air circulation in the upper atmosphere.


My own anecdata suggests that I often get sick right after the heat goes on in my house -- which means closed windows (theory #1) and much dryer air (theory #3). I don't believe that the cold or flu virus suddenly appears in my home around that time, just that I'm suddenly more susceptible to it. The same may be true for your toddler's daycare pals.
posted by ourobouros at 5:43 AM on October 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


Parents come into far more contact with potential carriers than kids do, so if a kid winds up with a bug, it almost certainly came from a parent originally. Parent picks up a bug while at work or at the store, brings it home to their kid, kid gets sick, kid spreads it to other kids at school and also to their parents at home, who bring it to work and give it to their coworkers, who then go home to their own kids...
posted by Autumnheart at 6:33 AM on October 19, 2018


Kids super don't understand germ theory. I can explain until I turn blue in the face to my child that she needs to wash her hands and yet still she'll sometimes avoid wiping herself because then it means she needs to wash her hands and she doesn't want to. We're on our fourth cold between us since the start of school. I tried to avoid kissing her on the lips before pre-school drop off but she looked like she was going to cry so. I am still on antibiotics from the last disease and I will probably get this one too.

I will never forget going to the sandbox at the local park when a kid with a phlgemy cough coughed directly into my daughter's face. The mom, who was pregnant, just shrugged when I shot her a look, "The doctor says she's probably contagious but we go out of our minds when we stay in. It's been a month!" Our whole family got bronchitis that time.

Still, my child's daycare exclusion policy is that she can attend unless she has diarrhea, is vomiting, or has a fever. It specifically says we can bring them with coughs and runny noses. So we do.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 6:34 AM on October 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


If you go back to school in September it tends to be prime time for kids sharing all the germs they got over the summer and now are suddenly locked together in a classroom, plus activities like soccer and swimming and gymnastics and martial arts are in full-swing, and then that filters down to the younger siblings. I personally spend time in two after-school programs, plus I shake hands with dozens if not hundreds of parents each week and welcome their kids to classes, plus my kids are in two separate schools.

So I have had a cold already this school year. My hope is that this is keeping my immune system young. :) Also I am usually first in line with my family for the flu/influenza shot.

In case you asked this out of deep frustration, I had a childfree coworker one year right when I went back to work full time and my child was sick aaaaaalllll the time. I thought he was judging me with his constant comments about how when he was in school, he never got sick and still never gets sick. Like I used to cringe when I had to leave to get antibiotics for an ear infection.

And then one day I said something mild back and he said OH NO, see I was daycare and sick all the time and now I never get sick and I think that's why. Now I have zero evidence that this is true but I remember how much that meant to me at the time because I was sooooo worn out of the working mom -> sick toddler grind, which is awful, awful. Hang in there if this is you.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:15 AM on October 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


My old school ped told me that kids get all of their illnesses out of the way / build their immunity as soon as they are together enclosed as a group. So if they go to daycare, they'll never get sick in elementary. If they don't go to daycare, they'll spend the first couple of years at elementary being sick all the time. Anecdotally, his theory has proven correct at our house.

Wrt to the comments about working parents sending their kids to school, the first year that our kid was in daycare the parents were pretty good about keeping their kids home. The second year all of the kids in the class had a runny nose from October until May (not fevers though) and the parents were openly admitting to each other "I figure since he got sick here it's not going to do any harm to send him to daycare". Honestly, in the absence of fever, we sent our kid too.

I agree with the comments above about being in an enclosed space and drier air. I also like to remind people that cold and flu season goes hand-in-hand with Sugar Season - Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day. Sugar doesn't cause viruses, but it does lower one's immunity. Consume sugar sparingly, and with extreme prejudice.
posted by vignettist at 8:56 AM on October 19, 2018


These little viruses are always circulating. Usually our immune systems are strong enough to prevent them from making us sick.

But once cold weather starts, a few things happen. One is that the initial cold weather depresses our immune system a little bit; it dries out our sinuses and makes them more susceptible to picking up more of these viruses that are always out and about. And second is, we close the windows and start to spend more time indoors where we're exposed to all these circulating viruses, coming out of people's noses and mouths and getting onto their hands, and anything they touch, that we then touch and rub into our eyes and noses and whatnot.
posted by entropone at 9:34 AM on October 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Parents come into far more contact with potential carriers than kids do, so if a kid winds up with a bug, it almost certainly came from a parent originally. Parent picks up a bug while at work or at the store, brings it home to their kid, kid gets sick, kid spreads it to other kids at school and also to their parents at home, who bring it to work and give it to their coworkers, who then go home to their own kids...

Why would parents come into contact with more carriers at work than kids do at school? My kid is in a class of 14, and I'd bet she touches all of them every day, probably after wiping her nose on her hand. And they do likewise. And there are more than 100 kids in the building touching the common areas. Whereas I work in a building with maybe 40 people and most days I don't touch any of them. When I go to the store, kid usually is with me, probably touching ten times more things than I do and then rubbing her eyes.
posted by Kriesa at 11:15 AM on October 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


My kid is in a class of 14, and I'd bet she touches all of them every day

My kids attended school with classrooms of 17-19 most of the time, and 25-35 if the school had lost its bonus funding that let them have smaller classrooms. And then there's recess time on the playground.

Kids in public school are exposed to hundreds of strangers' germs every day.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:42 PM on October 19, 2018


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