A public health message for this flu season: please keep your snot to yourself | Katy Guest

From Covid to colds, winter viruses are rife. But even in this post-masking era, we can still be considerate of others

When I was starting out in my career, back in the last century, an advertising campaign for Lemsip was running on public transport. What sort of person goes to work with the flu?" asked the posters, with the take-no-prisoners answer, The person after your job. Stop snivelling and get back to work."

That time now feels like ancient history - an era when even those of us with comfortable, keyboard-bound jobs couldn't work remotely even if we didn't have hard-as-nails jobseekers biting at our heels. Back then, I was one of those people who would go to work with a cold. I thought it showed grit and determination. Soon afterwards I sat next to a colleague who had cystic fibrosis, and it belatedly dawned on me that I wasn't so indispensable as to have to risk other people's health. Two decades later, the Covid-19 pandemic made sure everyone knew that. There's nothing like watching deaths from an airborne respiratory illness climb to more than a thousand a day to ram home the message about keeping your germs to yourself.

Katy Guest is a Guardian Opinion deputy editor