Do the right thing: stay home if you have Covid
HEALTH officials are urging people to “do the right thing” and stay at home if they have symptoms of coronavirus.
Mike Sandys and Professor Ivan Browne, the directors of public health for Leicestershire county and Leicester city councils, warned the pandemic is not over.
There is no longer a legal requirement to isolate with a positive test or if you have symptoms – and free testing in England has ended. But Prof Browne said: “Anyone who tests positive for Covid, or has cold or flu-like symptoms, needs to stay at home for at least five days and only stop isolating if they no longer have a temperature and are feeling better.
“There may be no legal mandate to isolate, but we all have personal responsibility to do the right thing and do what we can to stop the virus from spreading.”
Mr Sandys said: “Employers have a part to play in helping their staff where they can to stay off instead of making them come in to work.
“Unnecessarily causing your staff to be off sick doesn’t feel like a good thing to do from my point of view.
“If you’re a customer-facing business, you’re basically saying you don’t care about your customers.
“Maybe people should start voting with their feet and start supporting businesses that take it seriously and look after their staff and look after their customers and if they don’t, then spend your money elsewhere.”
He said testing is “really important for people to understand whether they’re infectious”.
“It’s a fairly simple way of just having that check if you’ve been out, or you’re going out or you’re visiting somebody who is maybe more clinically vulnerable,” he said.
“It’s a fairly good way of limiting and mitigating the risks that others pose to you and you pose to them.”
Tests can be bought for about £2 a test from chemists and supermarkets.
Some at-risk groups and NHS and social care staff still have access to free tests.