Working parents are overwhelmed as kids get sick again and again

For a week in early October, Lucia Gugliotta, global head of people at AI video company Synthesia in London, worked with an unexpected office assistant: her feverish four-year-old daughter. "In the thick of it, she was in the bed behind me on Zoom calls, and I just apologized to my colleagues and explained," she said. "She really suffered — high temperatures." Two weeks earlier, her two-year-old son stayed home sick for a week.

Parents are facing a triple avalanche of influenza, COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), valiantly meeting work deadlines while struggling to fulfill return-to-office requirements. All three viruses are expected to keep doctor's offices hopping for the coming months, alongside the spread of old standbys like strep throat and common colds. 

The challenge is that flu, COVID and RSV all affect both children and adults, and sometimes the viruses hit one right after the other. That can fill a calendar with missed school days and child care hurdles at a time of year when annual sick days are waning, babysitters are largely unwilling to enter sick households, and companies are increasingly strict about in-office days.

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Amanda McDowell, 27, a pharmacy technician at a Kroger in Springfield, Tennessee, recently missed two weeks of work while her son recovered from flu — which was preceded by the respiratory inflammation croup, another bout of flu, and, before that, an RSV infection. "It's been insane," she said.

"I'm a single mother — my parents are able to help occasionally, but we all work the same hours." Local nannies ask $21 an hour, which is more than her $15 hourly salary. She says that when she or a colleague misses work, "we're just short that person, and the pharmacy gets backed up on filling people's prescriptions." 

This intensity of back-to-back illnesses is new for some parents.  In mid-November, the U.S. hospitalization rate for RSV jumped nearly 10 times from the level recorded in 2018-2019, the last season before the pandemic. And this month, as many as 47 US states were reporting "high" or "very high" levels of influenza. (Last year, only two states reported "high" on the comparable week.) Though COVID rates have edged downward since September, it's a foe that did not exist three years ago.

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"I've never experienced anything like this," said Angie Bergner, vice president of people and business operations at recruiting analytics firm Veris Insights in Washington DC.

Her son brought home COVID from preschool in October, which led the family to miss Halloween ("That's devastating for a 5-year-old"). Then came all-family flu, which resulted in missing Thanksgiving. "Usually at least one parent is okay. But we made it work — my husband and I looked at our meetings and decided whose take priority," Bergner said.

That make-it-work ethos is leaving parents in a spin cycle.

"The downside of resilience is that you get very used to extraordinarily challenging circumstances, and don't really perceive or label them as such," said Daisy Dowling, founder and CEO of consulting company Workparent in New York City, whose own clan has had at least one sick family member since Sept. 1. "Parents have been so shaped by the past several years that taking really important meetings with a child projectile vomiting in the background suddenly doesn't seem as big an ask as it would have been pre-pandemic."

Parents, she says, have lost their hold on what a happy, sustainable working parent routine could look like.

Experts blame the sudden viral explosion on increased indoor activities amidst cold weather, decreased masking and the long tail of pandemic isolation.

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"Children's immune systems were not exposed to such a wide range of viruses during the pandemic," said Chicago urgent care pediatrician Natalya Vernovsky, leading to a large population of adorable-but-susceptible viral hosts. Though national RSV hospitalization rates have decreased by a third in recent weeks, Vernovsky said her center is still flooded by sick children of all ages.

Kids, who along with older adults are most vulnerable to RSV, often develop infections of the small airways called bronchiolitis, followed by wheezing, with three to four days of fever. "Often an urgent care or ER trip is needed, and that takes a while, and they're often sent home with breathing treatments that need to be administered every 3 to 4 hours. It puts a huge load on the parents," she said.

RSV is more frequently diagnosed now than pre-pandemic, because practitioners are using a combination test for COVID, RSV and influenza. "Before, we'd say that the child had a cold, or bronchiolitis with wheezing," Vernovsky said.

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Parents have learned coping tricks for getting work done while kids wheeze and whine. "We try to do calls morning and evening, not when the kids are up and about," said Louise Austin, chief operating officer at London-based marketing agency Absolute Digital and mother of four boys and a girl, ages 10 to 25.

Dowling has mostly seen managers respond with accommodations to in-office requirements when parents communicate clearly that they've got sick children at home. "If parents don't say that, and get really upset because the return-to-work mandate is really chasing them, that's not constructive."

Bergner took it upon herself to stanch the flow of viruses: in early November she helped mobilize fellow preschool parents, who agreed to 30 days of masking, keeping kids home until all symptoms are resolved, and pooling funds for an industrial air purifier. At work, she's surviving by being ruthlessly output-oriented.

"I break it into chunks of what absolutely needs to get done in this hour, so I can push through."