With the NY State Restaurant Association
Tuesday, September 20th, 10-11:00 AM EST
Mental health is the leading cause of employee turnover, with 89% of employees who left their job this year reporting feeling burned out or unsupported. Economic uncertainty, stressful working environments, and more challenging interactions with guests and co-workers make restaurant and hospitality work more difficult than ever before. Despite this growing need for mental health support, many restaurant employees either don’t have or don’t know how to access mental health resources.
Our panel of experts will discuss what the current crisis looks like, why having an EAP alone may not be enough, and how to cost effectively offer resources and support to your employees while also mitigating your risk.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, call 988 or message the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.
This depends on your personal risk assessment. The White House is pushing that everyone get their booster by Halloween at the latest, and we think that’s a pretty good timeline. If you’re at high risk for severe illness, you should not wait. If you’re low risk, and you have holiday travel plans, you may choose to delay by a few weeks, but you don’t want to delay too much. These boosters are formulated for the latest BA.4 and BA.5 strains, but if you wait until December to get them, there might be new strains circulating by then. Getting everyone boosted before we get into the deeper winter months will help prevent surges. And don’t forget that it takes up to two weeks for the booster to really kick in.
Don’t throw your at-home rapid tests away just yet, even if the expiration date has passed. Testing companies are constantly continuing to test the efficacy of their products and then sending that data to the FDA to get extensions on their expiration dates. So, just because the date on the box has passed, don’t forget to check the FDA website for an extension, and keep those in the back of the closet in case it gets extended in the next few weeks or months.
While it’s not common, it’s something we’ve seen occasionally throughout the pandemic. Interestingly, we’ve had a number of these cases in the past few weeks. It’s possible to get both COVID and the flu at the same time, though unfortunate. And this year’s flu season is slated to be bad; Australia’s was the worst it’s been for years, and ours follows theirs. We expect to see more flu circulating this year than we have since the pandemic started, so we expect to see more of these double flu-and-COVID cases as we head into fall, winter and the real start of flu season.
We don’t think that most people in the US need to be overly concerned about polio, in part because the vast majority of adults are vaccinated and therefore very well protected against paralytic polio. If you have young kids, it’s a good idea to discuss this with their pediatrician and to ensure that they’re up to date on their polio vaccine and other routine childhood vaccines. Most people who are carriers of the poliovirus don’t have symptoms, which makes it tricky to track. It could easily continue to spread in the US among those who are not vaccinated, which puts vulnerable young kids at risk.