As everyone knows, if you're sick, you should stay in bed. Nevertheless, you can hear coughing and sneezing behind every computer in offices these days. If you want to protect yourself from infection, you should follow these tips:
- Keep your distance: When colds are rampant in the office, avoid firm handshakes and instead lean back and relax during conversations. Colds, coughs, and mild bronchitis are usually transmitted by viruses that spread through droplet infection.
- Clean up: Cold viruses also spread via surfaces that many people come into contact with. Therefore, it's best to disinfect doorknobs, telephones, keyboards, etc., daily.
- Handwashing: Thorough handwashing with soap is a reliable way to prevent infection with cold viruses. Lather your hands vigorously for at least 20 seconds, making sure to clean between your fingers.
- Fresh air: Heated air dries out the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract, thus weakening their self-cleaning system, the mucociliary clearance. Therefore, ventilate by opening windows wide for 5 minutes several times a day. This also reduces the concentration of viruses in the air.
- Strengthening the immune system: Sufficient sleep, a vitamin-rich diet and exercise in the fresh air can help to put the body's own defences in place to successfully fight off colds.
Loosen coughs and soothe coughing reflexes with special ivy extract
If, despite all precautions, an acute cough develops, treatment should involve a herbal cough medicine from the pharmacy. For adults, phytotherapeutic remedies for coughs and mild bronchitis containing a special ivy extract have proven effective, for example, as a cough syrup. Such treatment is not only well-tolerated but also highly effective: the special ivy extract acts as an expectorant and can also soothe the urge to cough. The cough syrup is suitable for home use, while stick sachets, which can be taken without water or a spoon, are practical for on the go.
Treat viral coughs promptly
If an acute cough is treated promptly, there's a good chance of preventing the infection from spreading in the respiratory tract. However, antibiotics are not a good idea for viral cold symptoms, as they only work against bacteria and are ineffective against viruses.
A break from the risk of infection: Off to the home office!
Those who have the option of working from home can, of course, most effectively protect themselves from sniffling and coughing colleagues by spending a few days working from home – and letting the wave of colds pass them by.
Sick leave: When it's better not to go to work with a cold – and what is then allowed
Whether in an open-plan office or working from home, bravely continuing to work has its limits. Even when working in an office with a cold, there's a risk of worsening the illness beyond a certain level of illness and stress. And at the latest when symptoms such as severe fatigue, fever, body aches, or a strong cough with phlegm appear, the old adage "if you're sick, you belong in bed" is absolutely true.
Staying away from open-plan offices and the workplace in general with such cold symptoms should certainly not be an issue. There's also no need to delay seeing a doctor for fear that the sick leave will last longer than necessary for recovery: A sick note protects you from having to go to work with, for example, a severe cold, but it is not a work prohibition. As soon as the symptoms allow, it's perfectly fine to slowly resume work – even in such cases, working from home has clear advantages over an open-plan office.