Omg Tessa, who cares? People take leave for a million reasons.
ETA: Yes I said 2020 was cancelled, but that had at least a little to do with the fact that I am a germaphobe. I was perfectly willing to cancel plans for a year if it meant stemming the tide of this thing. This has been an unprecedented pandemic in our time and I don't believe that most people knew it would get this bad back in March or April. I remember the first time experts said that it may last until July and people not believing it.
People have to make their own decisions for themselves. Now with your example, I made a calculation and took a leave from March to May, returned June-November when things died down a bit, then took another leave. But everyone’s situation is different. Taking a leave during this pandemic isn’t as simple as “I want to avoid getting sick”. Maybe they need to care for a family member who got sick. Or maybe a family member died and they have to take care of their kids. A variety of different reasons people can’t come to work.
Like so many other things in my life right now where people can't seem to figure out the English words I am speaking to understand the concept behind it (I so hate that they act like they can't understand how I'm stringing words together).
When this first hit the news, it was obviously different. Swine flu, all the bird flus, a couple other new viruses, they all lacked one big thing, and every single year that one thing was trumpeted large. They had not developed the mutation needed for easy human to human transmission. Most had no human to human transmission outside a handful of cases. A few got a limited amount but was so poor at it that the virus pretty much killed itself off because it wasn't moving on fast enough. Every one of those, all over mainstream news and any science devoted area of social media, it was said that if the latest virus got that mutation, we were fucked and then fucked a second time.
Then this one comes along and it's in a lot of mainstream and reputable information places, that this is even worse than the swine flu and bird flus. All those, we had a little bit of immunity from similar flus. This, we got nothing. The knowledge spread really fast because it was still mostly in Asia and their scientists were releasing the information of how crazy fast they were seeing COVID-19 spread, and how it's probably going to be the same way here.
Once here, there were all the charts for how first and second wave worked, and pretty early on scientists were talking about summer and how it would likely be a second wave unless by some miracle heat kills COVID-19. Schools were closed for the year. Vaccines were predicted for 2022.
Now at that point people who are considering taking leave just to get away from the danger would get several months of calendar sheets laid out, go over personal/family risk factors, and try to get some sense of if personal risk was going to increase or decrease during the next few months. Family members who are sick, are they expected to get better or get worse? What duties, whether personal, familial or professional, would take one out of the house? Is there unavoidable travel? What are the stats for the locality? When will personal risk factors move up and down? What about future holidays, what traditionally causes people to gather in large numbers? Crunch the numbers as best you can with the data you have and figure out if now is better than 6 months from now, or if the length of leave allowed means waiting a month and then taking it for something 5 months from now.
But it seemed so many people didn't think logically and plan, and instead went with raw emotion and were blindsided when the virus wasn't gone a few months later.
If there was infinite leave, whatever.
If there were more liberal leave policies, where a mistake of going with emotion doesn't hurt the future, whatever.
But if acting on raw emotions rather than think "Well what about 10 months from now? Is it more likely going to have vanished or more likely still making people sick?" and then getting caught in an impossible situation months after taking leave, well that's basically watching someone hurt themselves on purpose. And from a human aspect, watching that is hard because you don't want people to hurt. Yet stopping the raw emotion, the refusal to look over the next months or years in lieu of satisfaction now, that can't be stopped. It doesn't change that someone willfully and deliberately blinding themselves to the long-term outlook is being silly. But the reason to care is because being silly could easily hurt them, and that's a terrible thing.
