Few people look at flu season with as much trepidation as office workers. But there are some effective ways to stay healthy even if you’re working in a packed office. It just requires a little proactive strategizing but could have a large impact on your staying healthy during the height of flu season.
Understanding the Risk Factors Allows for Proactive Decisions
The flu is primarily transmitted through bodily fluids. In particular, through droplets made when people cough, sneeze, or even speak. This means you have options to avoid those particulates. You can’t see microscopic droplets, but you can predict where they’ll appear. For example, if someone’s standing close to you and speaking then you’re exposed to pathogens if they’re sick. This idea centers around vectors. A vector is the element that spreads a disease. During flu season, everyone in your office is a potential vector. So how can you be proactive and avoid the flu in your office?
Begin By Taking Care of Yourself
The first step is to maximize your own health. Eat properly, get plenty of sleep, and seek natural wellness to reach and maintain your maximum potential for health. The naturally occurring compound CBD and CBD products can help you be proactive against the flu in a few different ways. CBD can help you relax, get more sleep, and adjust to healthier diets. And new evidence even suggests that CBD might be able to guard cells from viral attacks.
Those are seemingly simple steps. But everything you do to improve your health improves your ability to fight off the flu. Even proper fiber intake has been shown to have protective effects against the flu.
It’s About Stacking the Odds Rather Than Using a Universal Panacea
Of course, vaccinations are the main weapon to wield when trying to fight off the flu. But flu vaccines aren’t fully protective. Rather, they have varying levels of effectiveness each year. That might seem disappointing at first, but proactive stances against the flu are all about stacking the odds.
Everything you can do to decrease the effectiveness of any given vector has a good chance of protecting you. For example, if you get a flu shot that has a 60% chance of offering full protection then that’s already quite good. But where vaccinations really come into play is if you convince a coworker to get it as well. By doing so you now have a 60% chance of removing a possible vector, as their chances of infection have also gone down. You can think of a vaccination as putting another brick in the wall of protection. The protective effect grows exponentially by the number of people in your office who’ve been vaccinated.
Since the flu is transmitted through droplets, try to stand a little further away from coworkers when speaking. Avoid directly breathing in from a surface someone else has been using recently – such as office phones. And in general, try to encourage your coworkers to take the same precautions you have. Proactive fights against the flu are a team effort.