It's illegal to work around food when showing symptoms of contagious diseases. Why not the same for everyone else? Each person who gets a cold infects one other person on average. We could probably cut infection rates and the frequency of colds in half if sick people didn't come in to work.
And if we want better biosecurity, why not also require people to be able to reschedule flights if a doctor certifies they have a contagious disease?
Due to the 'externalities', the case seems very compelling.
Moving my commentary to a separate comment, so as to disambiguate votes on my commentary and the original argument.
European countries are way more lenient with workers who do not show up for health reasons. How does the data compare there, are workers more productive on average and sick less often?
Also, what is the unintended side effect of this? Do we open up an evolutionary niche for something even more horrible? Wouldn't it be better to require sick people to wear a face mask like it is usual in some Asian countries?
Typically with the evolution of pathogens, we see a trade-off between the ability of a pathogen to spread ("virulence") and the ability of the pathogen to keep the host alive (although there's definitely a lot of variation depending on the life history of the pathogen and the behavior of the host). Overall pathogen fitness (for between-host dynamics - it gets more complicated if the pathogen is competing with other pathogens within the host) is based on (virulence) x (number of other hosts that infected host contacts). So increasing host lifespan... (read more)