In the midst of a staffing crisis, managers can be your best defense or worst enemies when it comes to sick employees. Between norovirus, COVID, allergies, and mental health issues, managers play a big part in deciding who works, who stays home, and for how long. We'll discuss tools managers need to manage call outs, resources for employees and managers alike that can help reduce health-related staffing issues, and how to mitigate the impact of sick calls on the ongoing staffing crisis.
There’s plenty that you can do now to prepare for the next wave. First, determine a threshold for case counts that would trigger your “surge plan.” Your surge plan might include reinstating mask requirements for all employees, or if you’ve relaxed employee wellness checks or switched to sick calls, moving back to daily wellness checks. If you’ve brought employees back in-person at your offices, consider sending them back to remote work for a few weeks. If you’re a restaurant, think through how many employees would need to call out sick before you’d consider moving to off-premises dining. You can prep the communications and policy around this now, so that’s a relatively smooth transition if another surge does come. And in the meantime, use this current lull to have your COVID response team work on a campaign to get employees boosted - more than half of eligible adults aren’t boosted, and the booster is incredibly effective against Omicron and the BA.2 variant.
Like the first version of Omicron, BA.2 often presents (especially for those who are vaccinated) like a bad cold. Cough, runny nose, and sore throat seem to be more common with this than the original version of COVID, though fever, loss of smell, gastrointestinal symptoms, and a whole host of others are still relatively common. Even mild cases of COVID can make an otherwise healthy person feel pretty bad, and the possibility of long COVID is still high for those who have mild cases, so it’s certainly not “just a cold” in the traditional sense.
It’s proven that strong ventilation can drastically slash the risk of transmission in an enclosed indoor space by over 80%. Generally, you want to target about 4-6 air changes per hour in most smaller indoor spaces, and it’s best to aim for the higher end there, especially in places like restaurants, where people will definitely be unmasked. Realistically, we think that moving forward, new buildings should plan for top of the line ventilation and filtration, aiming for that sweet spot of 6 changes per hour or more. For current spaces that aren’t up to snuff and where a major investment isn’t in the cards, quick fixes like additional air filters and open windows really do make a huge difference.
There’s a new bird flu that’s sweeping through the US now, after earlier cases started cropping up in Asia and Europe. It’s affecting poultry farms and backyard flocks in many US states and Canada, and epidemiologists are keeping an eye on it, but it’s not a major threat right now to humans. There are some people that have gotten sick and even died from it, but they all had direct contact with infected birds. And while there’s the possibility that it mutates, right now there’s no evidence that it can spread from person to person, only from an infected bird to someone that had close physical contact with that bird. We’re not too worried about this right now in terms of a human epidemic, though it could certainly add to food supply woes if more flocks need to be culled to contain the virus.
Why People Are Acting So Weird - The Atlantic
Regina Hall had a test for some of the single men in the Academy…
