And since there's no Miss Manners column designed to help you parse this updated landscape of acceptable behavior, we attempted to spell out what's considered polite or rude when it comes to sick season in 2024.

To come up with these points of decorum, we asked coworkers to weigh in on real-life scenarios. We also ran the results of our mini-survey by POPSUGAR advisory board member Andrea C. Love, PhD, and immunologist and microbiologist, the founder of ImmunoLogic, who helped flag anything that clashed with the actual best practices of hygiene and safety.