Who else is trying to figure out what holiday plans they need to cancel due to sickness?

While imperfect, I am grateful to be able to use home PCR to help answer that question with data. I have a Rhinovirus and my teenage kids have Influenza A.

Thursday I canceled going to a theatre to see Die Hard with my father and father-in-law. I felt OK but didn’t want to risk getting them sick. Friday I was feeling almost normal but chose to still work from home given PCR results (hopefully saving some coworkers the hassle).

When my Son started to feel sick I was worried that perhaps I had failed to isolate well enough from him. We ran a swab the next day to find he had Influenza A, not my Rhinovirus.

My son’s isolation failed to keep my daughter from the flu. I wish we had tried harder, her starting the flu now likely means she’ll be sick most of the Christmas break. Of course it’s possible she caught a different Flu at school, I’ll sequence the full genomes later to check.