The thing is if more sick people would stay at home less of us would have it.
Too right!
A friend of my sister turned up before Christmas to take her and several other women to a Christmas do. The driver was so ill with this bug that she barely made it through the meal, and became too ill to drive them back. Her son had to bring her husband out to collect the car and take the women home.
All of the other women developed the illness over the next few days, and I caught it off my sister a few days after her symptoms appeared.
I once had an argument with a colleague about a third person who had insisted on coming in to our open plan office when suffering from a bug like the one currently sweeping the country. Argumentative colleague said that people should come to work unless they were so ill that their legs gave way when they tried to get out of bed! I said that he was risking the health of everyone else and should go home.
The inevitable happened - sick guy got worse overnight and did not come in the following day. Over the next few days, all the people who had been sitting at desks close to his came down with the bug. One martyr struggling on for 3 days ended up causing about another 3 man-weeks worth of sickness! The really stupid thing is that original sick guy had barely done any work during those 3 days - he had spent most of his time coughing, blowing his nose, and sitting back in his chair groaning ...