A child accidentally went to school this week with covid. A thread

Say you are a family of five - lots of people have three kids. Say mum is a nurse and picks up covid in an essential workplace, but can’t isolate in a hotel for a variety of reasons. She isolates at home.

She stays in her room. She opens the windows. She cleans the toilet with bleach. But she’s still in a house with four other people, all isolating because they’re close contacts. Then her husband tests positive and the three kids test negative on day 11.

Her husband is now a case - and the three kids are close contacts of their dad. They still need to isolate.

Another eleven days goes by. One kid tests positive, and the other two test negative.

The other two are still close contacts and need to isolate...

You see where this is going...

Some people in a family of five - like mine, like many people I know - could end up in isolation for a month or more.

Say in that time, you get differing advice week to week from DHHS on who in the family is or isn’t a close contact...

It suddenly becomes really confusing to know who should or shouldn’t be isolating. Especially after you’ve all been in isolation for a month, or more.

Not saying this is what happened in this case. But I’ve heard it’s happened many times already.

It’s already complicated and stressful, and changing guidelines make it even more confusing.

GPs have been warning about this scenario for a long time. Our testing and tracing policies have improved, but there’s still confusion on the disproportionate burden families face.

Not strangely large families. Just normal families with two parents and a few kids. Who get exposed/infected in sequence.

There needs to be a streamlined process for testing and antibody testing in these scenarios. There needs to be improved communications with families.

Again - GPs have warned about this scenario. There continues to be a lack of clarity from DHHS as to how to manage it. Which is surprising, given how many of us have bog standard families with a couple adults and a bunch of kids. Otherwise mistakes will keep happening.

So - all the people screaming that you should just throw people in a hotel for two weeks because they can’t understand the rules - well, understand it might be six weeks. And understand that DHHS don’t have consistent rules on this yet. And that this might affect you.

If you live in a family, it might not be two weeks iso with a case. It might be much much longer. Unless we get better, somehow, at managing the not unsurprising or extraordinary instance of covid in families, nine months into the pandemic...

To be clear, this case is a system failure, and not a failure of the individual family. I know that this is an issue that has been flagged again, and again, and again, and again, by overworked exhausted GPs who are doing a better job of tracking dates and risk than DHHS.

It’s time for DHHS to let GPs make decisions and support families. It’s time to let GPs direct what families need. Honestly - this should be national policy on most health matters - but it’s of critical importance to all of us now.