Is that a cold or COVID?: How to handle awkward conversations

It’s leading not just to resentment, but to judgement on all sides.

“Maybe they’ve surrendered, and we have not,” says one friend about those who have multiple kids and are relaxed about the prospect of getting sick again, and therefore don’t declare whether they’re sick or have a family member at home with COVID, before meeting up with friends and family.

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“I’ve been challenged by members of my family and others who are non-medical as to whether I’m exaggerating the risk [of COVID],” says Professor Ian Hickie, a co-director at The University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre, of situations in which he’s inquired about whether someone has COVID if they’re unwell when he sees them, and they haven’t flagged it beforehand.

It annoys him.

“Because they’ve made the decision to put other people at risk, without that kind of knowledge,” says Hickie, who is primarily concerned about getting sick and then transferring an illness to loved ones who are older and more vulnerable.

“I say to them, ‘Have you got COVID?’ They go, ‘Oh no. It’s not COVID.’ I go, ‘Have you tested?’ They go, ‘Oh no.’ [I say] ‘Are you planning to test?’ ‘No’. They say, ‘The cough is different [than with COVID], or I have a sore throat.’”

He’s even been perceived as frightened.

“You’re just a scared person, you’re not a brave person,” Hickie says of how some people perceive him. It’s led to some uncomfortable conversations, he says.

But he understands where they’re coming from.

“It’s the nature of infectious disease, not to see yourself as the vector; you’re not the mosquito,” says Hickie. “We deny or minimise risk all the time. We deny the chance of getting infectious diseases in any public setting, the chances of having an accident on the way to the airport. I mean, in order to get on with our lives, we have to [downplay] risk all the time.”

Plus, the result of having endured such hard lockdowns and restrictions has meant that people have naturally swung hard in the opposite direction, he says. And many believe that because the majority of Australians have had COVID at least once, and are vaccinated, that COVID no longer poses any significant risk.

“You really want to get on with your lives; we don’t want COVID to have ever existed,” says Hickie.

It’s causing conflict in many families, says Adelaide clinical psychologist Tamara Cavenett.

“People are struggling with what’s appropriate to say or not, and how the other person will take it,” she says. “And we’re all, generally avoidant of conflict. That doesn’t help.”

“I certainly have people who have felt incredibly anxious and angry about exposures [to illness] that they feel they have had [without being given the opportunity to avoid the interaction],” she says.

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She suggests if we have any particular view that there is a risk to our health or to our loved ones’ health, and we would like people to follow certain ways of interacting with us, that we should communicate this with the people before we see them.

“Because I think generally speaking, people are willing to be respectful,” says Cavenett. “They just assume their level of [perceived] risk is yours.”

We should also know that many people would like the chance to avoid social situations if people are unwell with illnesses other than COVID, too.

“I think [COVID] has raised our awareness of how transmissions happen and [they want] to avoid some of that, in a way that perhaps pre-COVID we would have paid less attention to,” says Cavenett.

As for those who are frustrated with family members who are curtailing their social interactions more than they’d like? Cavenett sees them, too.

“There’s got to be an appreciation that anxiety plays a role and anxiety is often misunderstood by people who don’t share that same anxiety,” she says. “They don’t feel a risk of something, so they can’t necessarily easily understand why someone else would.”

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