17 ms·

Workers are calling out sick in droves

82 points by nimbius 5y ago

micromacrofoot 5y ago
Workers and their families are getting sick in droves. I hate how headlines like this loosely frame it as a problem with workers. It's like the "worker shortage" kind of garbage... we've got plenty of workers in most sectors, but there's a shortage of companies willing to pay what they're asking. Why is it never a "wage shortage"?
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Even worse, the article's source appears to be six individuals affiliated with six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. None of their claims are verified or even investigated for accuracy. Not to say that people aren't getting sick or that they aren't calling out but it's clear that the author has no authoritative basis to make any claim on the subject.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    Which leads you to wonder why the article was published at all.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Not going to say they are the authoritative source or that their data point is sufficient enough. I would say that ever person I have talked to who runs a business or is a worker at a business has many people who are sick currently. I think the author probably used this example to paint a broader picture that resonates with probably most people who are connected to society at this point. The reason they used "worker" is because its the largest class of individuals and it IS having real supply chain issues. It ISN'T because people aren't getting paid enough but because people are sick and shouldn't work so as not to infect other people.
    - jimbob45 5y ago
      Isn't that the main credibility problem facing journalism today though? It's these publications asking for credibility because "just look around, bro" or "look at these six examples, it's everywhere". You can't establish a pattern based off of emotions and expect to be respected as a serious news agency. You could argue that it's the reason that FOX News lost so much respect around ~2010 from FOX and Friends. It's the BLM activists asking you to "look at the racism happening everywhere" and the election truthers telling you that "you just know fraud is happening - nobody I know voted for Biden". I can't draw conclusions based on your feelings, no matter how strong they are. It's telling that 13/52 and 13/90 have stuck around so well because those are real, factual numbers. Perhaps they're entirely misleading but, at the very least, newsreaders appear to be far more interested in those real numbers than "feelings-based" articles like the one above. Part of the magic of FiveThirtyEight early on was their deep commitment to showing the statistical analysis behind every single article. You didn't have to just trust their reporters because they had the MiniTab or MATLab printout on every article that you could read for yourself. They fully describe their methodology behind their pollster ratings and election forecasts, even if you don't agree with them. 538 has since gotten away from their statistical analyses a bit and their viewership and credibility has suffered accordingly.
      - nradov 5y ago
        Modern journalism consists of looking at today's trending topics on Twitter, then finding a few related anecdotes about it to turn into a "news" story that pushes the publication's preferred narrative. Those articles aren't false per se, but they do nothing to help readers understand what's really happening.
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      Given that the cdc reported 1.4 million cases in a day last week, and that only includes people who got tested, it's probably more like 3 million. That's 1% of the population getting infected per day. So yeah this checks out.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > Even worse, the article's source appears to be six individuals affiliated with six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. None of their claims are verified or even investigated for accuracy. They're not the BLS. If you're expecting that level of coverage then there's virtually no news stories aside from whatever government stats came out that day.
  - dahart 5y ago
    > six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. Just to check the accuracy, how did you arrive at this number? AFAICT, United Airlines has 93k employees, so alone represents approximately 0.028% of the US workforce, roughly 300x your guess, right?
  - zuminator 5y ago
    0.0001% of the US workforce is 156 people. United Airlines alone had 3000 out with COVID simultaneously. That's not just some random worker lamenting; it was stated in an official memo by their CEO, linked to in the story.
  - gamblor956 5y ago
    "At United Airlines, CEO Scott Kirby said nearly a third of the workforce called out sick on one day alone at Newark Liberty International Airport. At MOM's Organic Market, some of its East Coast stores have had to deal with 15 out of 50 workers out on a single day. And at the community health center Mary's Center in Washington, D.C., half of the COVID-19 Response Team tested positive for the virus over the past few weeks." The article literally starts with the CEO of a public company that employs several tens of thousands of people saying that 1/3 of their workers at one of their busiest facilities called out sick. The MOM's source is...their Chief of HR. The sources for the hospital were its CEO and chief nurse. Whatever ideological point about journalism you thought you were trying to make, you did not make it.
- newaccount2021 5y ago
- devmunchies 5y ago
  > Workers and their families are getting sick in droves. true. we were going to cancel a family birthday last weekend because people had covid but we found out each family currently has it so we kept it. Omicron is spreading like a flame on summer grass.
  - brimble 5y ago
    About half of my friend circle has had it in the last two weeks (and no, not because we're passing it to each other). There had been one case of Covid in the whole group the entire rest of the pandemic.
    - nradov 5y ago
      One case that you know of. Unless your entire friend circle has all been getting weekly tests since February 2020 it's likely that some have had asymptomatic infections. The CDC estimated that only about a quarter of infections were officially counted as "cases". https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
      - brimble 5y ago
        Odds of having it pass through a whole household without a trace would be lower, of course, but you are right that some of them/us may have had asymptomatic infections earlier on. About half have had symptomatic infections, all from different sources (not due to us getting together), in the past couple weeks. Everyone in the house, even little kids, are getting sick (fever, at least, every time), in every single case so far (unless, again, some of us have had it pass through and no-one in the house had symptoms). If that 1/4 symptomatic rate holds for omicron (I'm doubting it, but maybe) then something like 3-4% of the country's contracting it per day. Even if not, then it's still somewhere around 1%/day, minimum.
        webmaven 5y ago
        One thing I haven't seen data on is whether Omicron's milder symptoms also means that a higher percentage of infections are asymptomatic (and undetected).
- boringg 5y ago
  I think you miss the point of the article - it's to broadcast to the world businesses have significant worker shortages as a function of society is getting sick. Therefore a lot of the things that people would expect are not viable right now (flight cancellations, classes cancelled, hospital staffing issues, delivery issues, etc). Just because it doesn't mention families doesn't mean that there is some strange weird deliberate bias.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    Sorry, I maybe muddied the waters by adding families... I meant the phrasing of "calling out sick" rather than "getting sick" – the latter is more accurate and the former has a minor implication that it's the fault of the worker. Getting sick happens to people, calling out sick is something people do. There seems to be an undercurrent of bias that faults workers in a lot of reporting. Maybe it's confirmation bias on my part, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
    - evilduck 5y ago
      Yeah, "calling out sick" allows for the possibility that people aren't really sick and there might be abuse of sick time happening for other reasons, like coordinated sick-out protests or just individuals being fed up. In this case, the droves of people claiming sick time are most likely genuinely sick.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        What might also be happening is that people are forced to call sick due to being tested positive or a close contact of one, even though they aren't actually feeling sick. We're seeing this here in Spain a lot now. A bit higher up in this thread someone mentioned not cancelling a birthday because all the guests had COVID anyway. But work environments are more strict. I have a feeling this is what they meant by stating it that way, not implying that the workers aren't actually sick. A case of COVID is easily verified anyway.
        5y ago
- gruez 5y ago
  [deleted]
  - brimble 5y ago
    > "workers are getting sick" doesn't imply any sort of blame. Indeed. Instead the headline is "workers are calling out sick in droves". [EDIT] gruez noted below that the original post was based on an error, please don't punish their Internet points too much.
    - rdtwo 5y ago
      It implies that companies are being denied their rightful labor
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    The framing of "calling out sick" instead of "getting sick" is what sort of implies some blame for workers. It isn't a super strong connotation, but it does exist.
    - gruez 5y ago
      my bad, I didn't realize that "getting sick" wasn't the original wording.
    - Kessler83 5y ago
      "in droves" isn't exactly a neutral expression, either. Says something about how they see workers.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      To me it implies that they're actually calling out. Prior to 'rona it was normal to get sick and still go to work in many industries.
- amelius 5y ago
  > Why is it never a "wage shortage"? Because salaries are not transparent.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    They are sufficiently transparent to claim a "wage shortage", what number do you want that you can't get from bls.gov?
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    At the scale "worker shortage" is declared, average salary data is also available.
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  >Why is it never a "wage shortage" Wages don't occur in a vacuum. If people want more pay than can be made back by selling the products, then there is no job and no product. How about instead on focusing on ensuring there are multiple companies competing for workers of every skill level (which there are), in which case the wages are likely close to what can be paid.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    When companies are cheaping out on labor and competing with other companies doing the same it is artificially lowering prices at the expense of the workers. If they all had to pay them more then prices would at worst go up around the board. Therefore any price that people are unwilling to pay will not be because the competition offers a lower price, but because they are unwilling to purchase the product at all at that price. If that happens and it causes some businesses to be unviable because no one will pay the price required, then maybe we don't need those businesses.
    - adwn 5y ago
      > When companies are cheaping out on labor and competing with other companies doing the same it is artificially lowering prices at the expense of the workers. If companies can't afford higher wages because it would make their products so expensive that they couldn't find enough customers for them, then you can hardly call that "artificial".
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        Oh, you mean that thing I addressed in the very next paragraph? I'm saying I don't think we've reached that point yet. In other words, I think prices are often as low as they are not because people won't pay more, but because companies have exploited the labor market to lower prices creating a race to the bottom.
        ChrisLomont 5y ago
- parkingrift 5y ago
  I think you’re reading too much into the headline. In order for workers to call out sick they must be sick. I don’t perceive any negative connotations to the phrase “calling out sick.” The article is about employee shortages due to sick workers. I don’t think the title is misrepresenting that.
  - QuercusMax 5y ago
    You've never heard of somebody calling out sick when they aren't actually sick? The connotation of the headline is absolutely that workers are faking sick, even if the content of the article doesn't say that.
    - decafninja 5y ago
      Aren't there usually a limited number of sick days? My previous jobs have all given me a grand total of 2 sick days plus 2 personal days. Anything beyond that would have cut into vacation days.
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      Just the opposite. "Workers are getting sick in droves" would be analysis, and not appropriate. And if you read the article, the article wraps up with information that counters your claim that NPR is pushing an agenda about workers. I think people are so accustomed to clickbait-y headlines, they see an agenda in the headlines of an organization that actually practices strong journalistic standards and plays it "safe" with its headlines, saying less than more.
      - 8note 5y ago
        Calling out sick implies using voice and not text to message their sickness, which is also analysis. "Workers are using sick days, and businesses do not have enough workers not on sick days" is a plain jane version
    - parkingrift 5y ago
      Sure I have but neither the headline nor the article imply any such thing. I do not infer any such negative connotation from the title. Is there another term for calling out sick that you believe doesn’t have such a connotation?
- atlantas 5y ago
- missedthecue 5y ago
  To me that's like saying there's not a housing shortage, just a shortage of people willing to pay what home sellers are asking. Right now, the US population is higher than it's ever been, but there are several million fewer workers than in 2019. That's the definition of a shortage.
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    Where do you think they went to? They're still there, they just don't want to do crappy jobs for low pay. If you increase pay all of a sudden that 'shortage' seems to dry up. If I want a 2 dollar cheeseburger and all I can find are 4 dollar cheeseburgers is there a cheeseburger shortage?
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Many retired, and are unlikely to come back for any kind of raise. Others have had children. And pay has risen steadily. It doesn't seem very obvious to me why you think people were happy to work for $15/hr in 2019 but would rather earn nothing than $18/hr today. Wage examples taken from local small business hiring signs around my city.
- anthony_romeo 5y ago
  As a statistical aside with respect to worker shortages and unemployment in the U.S., here's some BLS data: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm For reference, unemployment rates in the US are recorded by six increasingly-broad measures (from U-1 to U-6). U-3 is the internationally-defined "official" unemployment representing 'everyone actively working, or actively looking for work'. U-6, the broadest measure, includes U-3 as well as "all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" [basically, unemployed people who stopped looking for work (but theoretically want to work), as well as the underemployed]. U-3 alone does not provide a full picture of unemployment. Sometimes U-3 can go down, but U-4, U-5, or U-6 increase because workers are leaving the labor force entirely. Based on the BLS data, unemployment has been trending down by all measures. This suggests to me that the continued decreases in the unemployment are real and not misleading. Other tables also indicate that U-3 has decreased among all industries and age ranges: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm My armchair suspicion is that, though the "worker shortage" was a very real issue in 2021, the problem [at least nationally] has broadly leveled-out, and that discussions on a national "worker shortages" continue to emerge from a type of, say, 'conversational inertia' when discussing localized labor shortages (e.g. problems with industry X in state/county Y) or acute shocks to supply (e.g. large numbers of people getting sick at the same time). Localized shortages or acute shocks are also meaningful and need to be resolved as they come up, but they may be only tangentially-related to a national worker shortage. I'd love to hear more thoughts on this if others want to chime-in. I didn't do any sort of rigorous analysis on this. There could also be still substantial multi-state/regional shortages hidden among the numbers. I didn't really delve into "reality" or how the data may not actually reflect "real life" or other labor-related issues (e.g. income) -- I just like looking at these stats every now and then.
  - svnpenn 5y ago
    You managed to type all that and still avoid addressing the comment you replied to, bravo. The original comment position is that any current shortage is in large part due to rampant low wages across multiple sectors. Did you have an actual refutation of that, or did you just want to distract with tangential information?
- dfxm12 5y ago
  Why is it never a "wage shortage"? Because big media outlets tend to side with big business over labor, despite cries about "the liberal media".
- spaceisballer 5y ago
  Definitely sick in droves. I have three people I work with that are all out sick today with COVID. We all work remote but their families they live with are all sick. Omnicron is spreading like wildfire.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rdtwo 5y ago
It’s true, our child care collapsed. A bunch folks folks are sick at work either for actual sickness, to care for kids or a sick family member. It’s a cascade of institutional failures. Btw F-Npr they used to good but now it’s a New York Times like propaganda network.
- relaytheurgency 5y ago
  I don't think the opinion about the source is appropriate on Hacker News, but I can concur the child care problem is real and difficult. My child's classroom closed for a week because of a positive case. My child tested negative, so she can still potentially get sick which would cause _another_ closure plus she would have to quarantine for 10 days. There are 8 kids in the classroom, so I could be looking at losing 7*5+10 days of child care before this is over.
  - D13Fd 5y ago
    Yes, the child care problem is huge. My kids' daycare is short-staffed due to staff being out sick, which means they have to combine the classrooms at times. Then when one child in a combined classroom tests positive for COVID, all of those kids--and all of the teachers--are sent home for the isolation period. This results in more short-staffing and more combined classrooms, which leads to even more opportunities for COVID exposure. It's a cascading failure, and it doesn't stop there. The parents end up watching their own kids and have to call out of work themselves (or work remotely at greatly reduced capacity).
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      It's a policy failure. Government should've paid a parent to stay home and provide childcare for their kids until under 5s could be vaccinated, instead of what we have now, which is a broken, dysfunctional childcare system attempting to keep itself together (and failing, both due to wages being too low to make the work worthwhile, spread of COVID, etc). I don't know how you convince anyone in the current environment to be a childcare provider or teacher, when there are robust alternative employment options available that pay more for a better work environment.
cafard 5y ago
"And at the community health center Mary's Center in Washington, D.C., half of the COVID-19 Response Team tested positive for the virus over the past few weeks." Mary's Center serves a population with low income, and probably sees bunches of small children. If you really want to catch COVID, Mary's Center is probably a great place to volunteer.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
My father in-law plows roads for the city during the winter. He was forced to take time off work and pay for a covid test out of pocket because he coughed during a lunch break at the station between routes. Why did he cough? Choked on a peanut in his lunch. Thankfully the union made sure he was reimbursed for his missed time - but I (anecdotally) know plenty of other people who were forced to stay home for some ridiculous reason or another. Another one off the top of my head was a spouse that tested positive on a rapid test, he tested negative, and neither of them had any symptoms at all but he was forced to quarantine. PCR test for the spouse ended up coming back negative - the rapid test was a false positive. Both missed 5 days of work with no union to fight for either of their wages. I've heard way too many stories like this to think this "sick worker crisis" is nothing but self-inflicted hysteria on the part of businesses.
andrewclunn 5y ago
Daughter and I both had covid last week. Omicron is gonna get everyone. There's no way to flatten this curve. At least it had the decency to hit its peek in January, after full time workers got their sick time replenished for the year.
- brimble 5y ago
  The reduction of recommended quarantine time was clearly an acknowledgement of this. Keeping it at two weeks with no way to significantly reduce infection rates would have led to a month of everything being shut down, and everyone still getting sick anyway. Hell, it may yet lead to a week or three of de facto shutdown, just from actual out-sick time. The folks in charge have given up, without explicitly saying so. [EDIT] For some evidence that we may get a de facto shutdown anyway: our (large) school district was short three hundred teachers the other day, and only managed to get one hundred subs. The schools are barely hanging on and shutting down or going remote for a week or two to cool things off and/or wait out the peak is a distinct possibility, which will have knock-on effects for the rest of the economy, which is also already dealing with high absence rates due to illness or direct exposure (which, with Omicron, is equivalent to "definitely has it, just waiting for symptoms").
  - mml 5y ago
    my school district has been short 2-300 teachers ALL YEAR. my kid didn't have a math teacher for the first few months, then got one, who proceeded to quit a few weeks later. now math class is watching YouTube videos about math. or it would be, but the district just went remote...
    - rdtwo 5y ago
      100% a pay and working condition problem.
  - nradov 5y ago
    In California anyone with a Bachelor's degree and clean background check can now sign up to be a temporary substitute teacher. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/01/11/governor-newsom-signs-executive-order-to-support-safe-in-person-learning-at-schools-amid-covid-surge/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/01/11/governor-newsom-signs-exec...
newsbinator 5y ago
> As a thank you to workers who have been putting in their hours and then some, MOM's introduced a $2 per hour bonus for all employees who complete their scheduled shifts within any pay period.
- bagacrap 5y ago
  this sounds like an incentive to come into work while sick
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    Yep
wefarrell 5y ago
It's telling that 20 years after 9/11 we're still taking our shoes off at airports yet we still don't have federally mandated sick leave despite being two years into a pandemic that has been more fatal than 9/11 by several orders of magnitude.
- beamatronic 5y ago
  It's the will of the voters.
  - andrew_ 5y ago
    That only works if you think we're truly represented by our representatives.
    - TameAntelope 5y ago
      "Truly" is doing a lot of work here, and creating an is/ought problem. Representatives do reflect the will of the people who elected them. The real problem is, on an individual level, your vote is statistically irrelevant, so it's easy to disassociate, and to blame "the others" who, collectively, have a vastly more powerful say over who represents you than you do. "They ought to vote more like how I want them to." you can say, "They don't vote correctly and I can't stop them, so it's the system's fault for giving them power over me!" This, of course, completely undermines the entire point of democracy, that it represents the collective will of the people, not any individual's arbitrary will. A representative democracy works even if you don't believe it does. It stops working if everyone doesn't believe it does, which is certainly not even close to the case in the US.
      - andrew_ 5y ago
        And if people believe that politicians are more about self-interest than representative interest and that it doesn't generally matter who is elected?
        5y ago
emptybottle 5y ago
Part of it must be the new relaxed measures that have been put in place at schools, and phasing out of contact tracing. Aside from people who are sick themselves, kids are getting sick causing parents to use sick leave to care for them at home (and exposing themselves to illness in the process) Complicate that by sick teachers and carers interrupting normal child care routines, also causing parents to miss work.
penjelly 5y ago
anecdote to add to others: i knew 1 person directly who might have had covid in the last two years (minus the last 2 months). in the last two months i know half a dozen confirmed sick, canada has limited testing capacity so it would probably be higher if we had that availability
werdnapk 5y ago
Is the term "calling out sick" regional or something? I've always said "calling in sick".
- devin 5y ago
  It does appear to be regional. Check out https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/call-in-sick-or-call-out-sick https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/call-in-...
- thomascgalvin 5y ago
  The difference is between "I'm calling [to tell you I'm] out sick" and "I'm calling in [to tell you I'll be out because I'm] sick."
TurkishPoptart 5y ago
In my state, we have a reduced "hospital capacity" because 3,000 nurses and other HCW were fired for not getting sufficiently "vaccinated". Now our governor (Inslee) is calling retired HCWs back into the workforce. Complete madness - not rooted in science, but in political science. Our country is due for a talk about natural immunity, especially when most of the people I know who've had 3 "vaccine" shots and still got covid. Are they now immune?
- jrockway 5y ago
  On a statistical level, the vaccines don't have to be 100% effective, and they aren't. For every person you hear about being sick after 3 doses, there are probably 10 people that would have gotten it, but didn't. If there was 10x less healthcare capacity, you can see why that would be a larger problem. That said, the vaccines do seem pretty focused on the 2019 variant of COVID-19. It's 2022 now, and that variant is dead. So we're definitely getting imperfect protection. (I got my 3rd dose anyway, of course. And I'm still treating the pandemic like a pandemic. I skipped holiday travel, I don't go out unless absolutely necessary, etc.)
  - bigyellow 5y ago
    I like how vaccines can "probably" reduce chances of being sick, but saying vaccines "probably" have unknown long-term effects is heresy.
    - pacerwpg 5y ago
      We have evidence of one and not the other. It's really simple.
      - bigyellow 5y ago
        Exactly. We have no evidence of long-term effects, and are trusting the same people who told us a year ago that vaccines provide protection to tell us they're safe. It's asinine.
- 5y ago
samwillis 5y ago
To add an antidotal datapoint for the UK, 23 of the 35 kids in my daughters (7yo) school year tested positive for covid since last Monday. Both teachers and their two substitutes have also tested positive. I believe we are one of the worst hit years in the school but the others aren't that far behind. My daughter tested positive today. I believe the majority of parents are testing their kids with LFTs daily. Until now we had maybe had 2-3 in total all pandemic in the year group. The good news is it doesn't seem to be affecting parents much, even siblings don't seem to be necessarily going positive. At the rate its blowing through our school/town right now I would expect us here to be well past the worst of it in about three weeks.
- wefarrell 5y ago
  Omicron is less likely to show up on rapid tests and maybe there's a discrepancy in that tendency between adults and children. My wife and I got it on Christmas from my family. She, I, and all of my family members have had three vaccine doses. All of my rapid tests were negative but my PCR was positive.
  - samwillis 5y ago
    I believe you are right, I think the only parents that are positive via LFTs are particularly symptomatic.
  - christkv 5y ago
    This is pretty common from what I've been told the home tests must be taken right in the right infection window and most of them have a false negative somewhere between 7-10% and some even worse against omnicron.
- laputan_machine 5y ago
  We passed the peak over a week ago https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/, here's hoping we're close to the end...
  - samwillis 5y ago
kemayo 5y ago
I don't like that they're sick, but I do like that sick workers are calling out. Ignoring the inherent effect of limited amounts of sick time that don't correspond in any way to how much you might get sick, there's a lot of pressure in some industries to still come in to work even if you're sick -- particularly, perversely, in some high-contact industries like nursing and food service. This has obvious negative consequences.
throwaway763 5y ago
In Australia, which seems to have put all its eggs in the vaccine basket, and squandered the last 2 years by doing almost zero prep for opening up, there are news reports about people who are confirmed covid cases are being asked to work in certain industries like meat processing. My wife works in childcare and isolating waiting for a result (36 hours and counting for a PCR test-in some states tests aren’t being processed for 7 days and then are thrown out) has been told by her supervisor that Covid-positive staff may have to work. We have a pack of RATs and she was negative on one, but they are extremely scarce, so we’re not using a second. Daycare and, soon, schools are going to allow covid to spread through with no mitigation attempts. The same lack of exposure to the world that allowed it to escape earlier waves has also led Australia to adopting extreme parodies of policies in place everywhere else: for example they opened up without any rapid testing and without improving PCR testing availability (you can’t get tested outside of weekday office hours). Lockdowns of any sort, school closures and remote learning have been a totally ruled out because that’s what the Australian state and federal governments imagine has happened in the rest of the world, despite the reality being more complex.
paulpauper 5y ago
Not a surprise. The only surprise is that it didn't happen sooner. The mass realization is setting in that: most jobs suck and are not worth the pay. People can hustle, find ways to make money or living arrangements that does not require a traditional job, such as gig work or living with friends or family.
gigel82 5y ago
Found the r/antiwork subreddit recently and it was quite illuminating to see the story from the actual workers' POV. People are sick, and their employers are asking them to come in anyway; the CDC move to 5-day quarantine is much less based in science than in "business needs".
- bmlzootown 5y ago
  From a worker's prospective, it sucks, but it's also rather bad from the employer's perspective as well (at least in my experience). Having to ask sick people to come in is not something I or my coworker want to do, but we're so low on staff right now that, if an individual tests negative and isn't running a fever, we need all the help we can get. Two other managers are currently out, multiple department heads and regular associates are out, and it's just the two of us running the show. I pulled a 12 hour shift Sunday just so said coworker could have a day off, and they're doing the same today for me. Just trying to open/close on time has been incredibly difficult lately, having to call around to cover morning/night shifts that people suddenly call out for. I'm not sure how much longer I can do this. I need this whole pandemic to come to a close solely for the sake of my own physical/mental wellbeing, if not also for everyone else's.
  - nradov 5y ago
    If your store closed for a few hours would that really be a disaster? Would you manager actually fire you if you refuse to work that much overtime? You're not obligated to work yourself into a mental breakdown.
    - rdtwo 5y ago
      A lot of stores could close temporarily without any real impact to society. At least for long enough to get over rona
      - danaris 5y ago
        ...provided their employees were still being paid.
standardUser 5y ago
We're averaging over 800,000 new cases every day. The previous high was just over 200,000 per day. So this is far and away the most cases we have ever seen, and it doesn't even count the mountain of at-home positives that never get reported. So none of this should be surprising at all. But rates of new cases are already plummeting in the places with the biggest Omicron peaks (the Northeast), so the "labor shortage" is a very short term issue, just like the various other "shortages" the media harps over, which all end up amounting to nothing but a brief inconvenience.
- mcguire 5y ago
  Remember back last year when the big issue was "Why are we shutting down? We should just go ahead and let it run its course!" Here's why we didn't: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases The peak number of cases reported daily in 2020 was in mid-December, at about 200,000. As standardUser says, we were having about 800,000 cases per day last week. On the other hand, we have vaccines now, and the current variant seems to be less deadly. As a result: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths_newhospitaladmissions https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths... Current new hospital admissions (right axis, completely different scale) are about 20,000 per day, versus 16,500 per day in early January 2021, and 1,700 deaths versus 3,000 last January.
irrational 5y ago
My family isn’t sick, but so many of my kids classmates and teachers are sick with Covid that they had to switch to all remote learning, right now just for this week. This has caused me to have to call in sick.
mcguire 5y ago
"As a thank you to workers who have been putting in their hours and then some, MOM's introduced a $2 per hour bonus for all employees who complete their scheduled shifts within any pay period." So they'll pay you an extra $2/hr to work sick? Nice.
nunez 5y ago
to be fair, i'm wondering how many of these people would have worked while sick before COVID made that untenable (voluntarily or otherwise)

82 points by nimbius 5y ago

Workers and their families are getting sick in droves. I hate how headlines like this loosely frame it as a problem with workers. It's like the "worker shortage" kind of garbage... we've got plenty of workers in most sectors, but there's a shortage of companies willing to pay what they're asking. Why is it never a "wage shortage"?

jimbob45 5y ago
Even worse, the article's source appears to be six individuals affiliated with six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. None of their claims are verified or even investigated for accuracy. Not to say that people aren't getting sick or that they aren't calling out but it's clear that the author has no authoritative basis to make any claim on the subject.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Which leads you to wonder why the article was published at all.
- boringg 5y ago
  Not going to say they are the authoritative source or that their data point is sufficient enough. I would say that ever person I have talked to who runs a business or is a worker at a business has many people who are sick currently. I think the author probably used this example to paint a broader picture that resonates with probably most people who are connected to society at this point. The reason they used "worker" is because its the largest class of individuals and it IS having real supply chain issues. It ISN'T because people aren't getting paid enough but because people are sick and shouldn't work so as not to infect other people.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    Isn't that the main credibility problem facing journalism today though? It's these publications asking for credibility because "just look around, bro" or "look at these six examples, it's everywhere". You can't establish a pattern based off of emotions and expect to be respected as a serious news agency. You could argue that it's the reason that FOX News lost so much respect around ~2010 from FOX and Friends. It's the BLM activists asking you to "look at the racism happening everywhere" and the election truthers telling you that "you just know fraud is happening - nobody I know voted for Biden". I can't draw conclusions based on your feelings, no matter how strong they are. It's telling that 13/52 and 13/90 have stuck around so well because those are real, factual numbers. Perhaps they're entirely misleading but, at the very least, newsreaders appear to be far more interested in those real numbers than "feelings-based" articles like the one above. Part of the magic of FiveThirtyEight early on was their deep commitment to showing the statistical analysis behind every single article. You didn't have to just trust their reporters because they had the MiniTab or MATLab printout on every article that you could read for yourself. They fully describe their methodology behind their pollster ratings and election forecasts, even if you don't agree with them. 538 has since gotten away from their statistical analyses a bit and their viewership and credibility has suffered accordingly.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Modern journalism consists of looking at today's trending topics on Twitter, then finding a few related anecdotes about it to turn into a "news" story that pushes the publication's preferred narrative. Those articles aren't false per se, but they do nothing to help readers understand what's really happening.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    Given that the cdc reported 1.4 million cases in a day last week, and that only includes people who got tested, it's probably more like 3 million. That's 1% of the population getting infected per day. So yeah this checks out.
- gruez 5y ago
  > Even worse, the article's source appears to be six individuals affiliated with six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. None of their claims are verified or even investigated for accuracy. They're not the BLS. If you're expecting that level of coverage then there's virtually no news stories aside from whatever government stats came out that day.
- dahart 5y ago
  > six different companies representing 0.0001% of the US workforce. Just to check the accuracy, how did you arrive at this number? AFAICT, United Airlines has 93k employees, so alone represents approximately 0.028% of the US workforce, roughly 300x your guess, right?
- zuminator 5y ago
  0.0001% of the US workforce is 156 people. United Airlines alone had 3000 out with COVID simultaneously. That's not just some random worker lamenting; it was stated in an official memo by their CEO, linked to in the story.
- gamblor956 5y ago
  "At United Airlines, CEO Scott Kirby said nearly a third of the workforce called out sick on one day alone at Newark Liberty International Airport. At MOM's Organic Market, some of its East Coast stores have had to deal with 15 out of 50 workers out on a single day. And at the community health center Mary's Center in Washington, D.C., half of the COVID-19 Response Team tested positive for the virus over the past few weeks." The article literally starts with the CEO of a public company that employs several tens of thousands of people saying that 1/3 of their workers at one of their busiest facilities called out sick. The MOM's source is...their Chief of HR. The sources for the hospital were its CEO and chief nurse. Whatever ideological point about journalism you thought you were trying to make, you did not make it.
newaccount2021 5y ago
devmunchies 5y ago
> Workers and their families are getting sick in droves. true. we were going to cancel a family birthday last weekend because people had covid but we found out each family currently has it so we kept it. Omicron is spreading like a flame on summer grass.
- brimble 5y ago
  About half of my friend circle has had it in the last two weeks (and no, not because we're passing it to each other). There had been one case of Covid in the whole group the entire rest of the pandemic.
  - nradov 5y ago
    One case that you know of. Unless your entire friend circle has all been getting weekly tests since February 2020 it's likely that some have had asymptomatic infections. The CDC estimated that only about a quarter of infections were officially counted as "cases". https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
    - brimble 5y ago
      Odds of having it pass through a whole household without a trace would be lower, of course, but you are right that some of them/us may have had asymptomatic infections earlier on. About half have had symptomatic infections, all from different sources (not due to us getting together), in the past couple weeks. Everyone in the house, even little kids, are getting sick (fever, at least, every time), in every single case so far (unless, again, some of us have had it pass through and no-one in the house had symptoms). If that 1/4 symptomatic rate holds for omicron (I'm doubting it, but maybe) then something like 3-4% of the country's contracting it per day. Even if not, then it's still somewhere around 1%/day, minimum.
      - webmaven 5y ago
        One thing I haven't seen data on is whether Omicron's milder symptoms also means that a higher percentage of infections are asymptomatic (and undetected).
boringg 5y ago
I think you miss the point of the article - it's to broadcast to the world businesses have significant worker shortages as a function of society is getting sick. Therefore a lot of the things that people would expect are not viable right now (flight cancellations, classes cancelled, hospital staffing issues, delivery issues, etc). Just because it doesn't mention families doesn't mean that there is some strange weird deliberate bias.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Sorry, I maybe muddied the waters by adding families... I meant the phrasing of "calling out sick" rather than "getting sick" – the latter is more accurate and the former has a minor implication that it's the fault of the worker. Getting sick happens to people, calling out sick is something people do. There seems to be an undercurrent of bias that faults workers in a lot of reporting. Maybe it's confirmation bias on my part, but it doesn't make a lot of sense.
  - evilduck 5y ago
    Yeah, "calling out sick" allows for the possibility that people aren't really sick and there might be abuse of sick time happening for other reasons, like coordinated sick-out protests or just individuals being fed up. In this case, the droves of people claiming sick time are most likely genuinely sick.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      What might also be happening is that people are forced to call sick due to being tested positive or a close contact of one, even though they aren't actually feeling sick. We're seeing this here in Spain a lot now. A bit higher up in this thread someone mentioned not cancelling a birthday because all the guests had COVID anyway. But work environments are more strict. I have a feeling this is what they meant by stating it that way, not implying that the workers aren't actually sick. A case of COVID is easily verified anyway.
      - 5y ago
gruez 5y ago
[deleted]
- brimble 5y ago
  > "workers are getting sick" doesn't imply any sort of blame. Indeed. Instead the headline is "workers are calling out sick in droves". [EDIT] gruez noted below that the original post was based on an error, please don't punish their Internet points too much.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    It implies that companies are being denied their rightful labor
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The framing of "calling out sick" instead of "getting sick" is what sort of implies some blame for workers. It isn't a super strong connotation, but it does exist.
  - gruez 5y ago
    my bad, I didn't realize that "getting sick" wasn't the original wording.
  - Kessler83 5y ago
    "in droves" isn't exactly a neutral expression, either. Says something about how they see workers.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    To me it implies that they're actually calling out. Prior to 'rona it was normal to get sick and still go to work in many industries.
amelius 5y ago
> Why is it never a "wage shortage"? Because salaries are not transparent.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  They are sufficiently transparent to claim a "wage shortage", what number do you want that you can't get from bls.gov?
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  At the scale "worker shortage" is declared, average salary data is also available.
ChrisLomont 5y ago
>Why is it never a "wage shortage" Wages don't occur in a vacuum. If people want more pay than can be made back by selling the products, then there is no job and no product. How about instead on focusing on ensuring there are multiple companies competing for workers of every skill level (which there are), in which case the wages are likely close to what can be paid.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  When companies are cheaping out on labor and competing with other companies doing the same it is artificially lowering prices at the expense of the workers. If they all had to pay them more then prices would at worst go up around the board. Therefore any price that people are unwilling to pay will not be because the competition offers a lower price, but because they are unwilling to purchase the product at all at that price. If that happens and it causes some businesses to be unviable because no one will pay the price required, then maybe we don't need those businesses.
  - adwn 5y ago
    > When companies are cheaping out on labor and competing with other companies doing the same it is artificially lowering prices at the expense of the workers. If companies can't afford higher wages because it would make their products so expensive that they couldn't find enough customers for them, then you can hardly call that "artificial".
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Oh, you mean that thing I addressed in the very next paragraph? I'm saying I don't think we've reached that point yet. In other words, I think prices are often as low as they are not because people won't pay more, but because companies have exploited the labor market to lower prices creating a race to the bottom.
      - ChrisLomont 5y ago
parkingrift 5y ago
I think you’re reading too much into the headline. In order for workers to call out sick they must be sick. I don’t perceive any negative connotations to the phrase “calling out sick.” The article is about employee shortages due to sick workers. I don’t think the title is misrepresenting that.
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  You've never heard of somebody calling out sick when they aren't actually sick? The connotation of the headline is absolutely that workers are faking sick, even if the content of the article doesn't say that.
  - decafninja 5y ago
    Aren't there usually a limited number of sick days? My previous jobs have all given me a grand total of 2 sick days plus 2 personal days. Anything beyond that would have cut into vacation days.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Just the opposite. "Workers are getting sick in droves" would be analysis, and not appropriate. And if you read the article, the article wraps up with information that counters your claim that NPR is pushing an agenda about workers. I think people are so accustomed to clickbait-y headlines, they see an agenda in the headlines of an organization that actually practices strong journalistic standards and plays it "safe" with its headlines, saying less than more.
    - 8note 5y ago
      Calling out sick implies using voice and not text to message their sickness, which is also analysis. "Workers are using sick days, and businesses do not have enough workers not on sick days" is a plain jane version
  - parkingrift 5y ago
    Sure I have but neither the headline nor the article imply any such thing. I do not infer any such negative connotation from the title. Is there another term for calling out sick that you believe doesn’t have such a connotation?
atlantas 5y ago
missedthecue 5y ago
To me that's like saying there's not a housing shortage, just a shortage of people willing to pay what home sellers are asking. Right now, the US population is higher than it's ever been, but there are several million fewer workers than in 2019. That's the definition of a shortage.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  Where do you think they went to? They're still there, they just don't want to do crappy jobs for low pay. If you increase pay all of a sudden that 'shortage' seems to dry up. If I want a 2 dollar cheeseburger and all I can find are 4 dollar cheeseburgers is there a cheeseburger shortage?
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Many retired, and are unlikely to come back for any kind of raise. Others have had children. And pay has risen steadily. It doesn't seem very obvious to me why you think people were happy to work for $15/hr in 2019 but would rather earn nothing than $18/hr today. Wage examples taken from local small business hiring signs around my city.
anthony_romeo 5y ago
As a statistical aside with respect to worker shortages and unemployment in the U.S., here's some BLS data: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm For reference, unemployment rates in the US are recorded by six increasingly-broad measures (from U-1 to U-6). U-3 is the internationally-defined "official" unemployment representing 'everyone actively working, or actively looking for work'. U-6, the broadest measure, includes U-3 as well as "all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force" [basically, unemployed people who stopped looking for work (but theoretically want to work), as well as the underemployed]. U-3 alone does not provide a full picture of unemployment. Sometimes U-3 can go down, but U-4, U-5, or U-6 increase because workers are leaving the labor force entirely. Based on the BLS data, unemployment has been trending down by all measures. This suggests to me that the continued decreases in the unemployment are real and not misleading. Other tables also indicate that U-3 has decreased among all industries and age ranges: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm My armchair suspicion is that, though the "worker shortage" was a very real issue in 2021, the problem [at least nationally] has broadly leveled-out, and that discussions on a national "worker shortages" continue to emerge from a type of, say, 'conversational inertia' when discussing localized labor shortages (e.g. problems with industry X in state/county Y) or acute shocks to supply (e.g. large numbers of people getting sick at the same time). Localized shortages or acute shocks are also meaningful and need to be resolved as they come up, but they may be only tangentially-related to a national worker shortage. I'd love to hear more thoughts on this if others want to chime-in. I didn't do any sort of rigorous analysis on this. There could also be still substantial multi-state/regional shortages hidden among the numbers. I didn't really delve into "reality" or how the data may not actually reflect "real life" or other labor-related issues (e.g. income) -- I just like looking at these stats every now and then.
- svnpenn 5y ago
  You managed to type all that and still avoid addressing the comment you replied to, bravo. The original comment position is that any current shortage is in large part due to rampant low wages across multiple sectors. Did you have an actual refutation of that, or did you just want to distract with tangential information?
dfxm12 5y ago
Why is it never a "wage shortage"? Because big media outlets tend to side with big business over labor, despite cries about "the liberal media".
spaceisballer 5y ago
Definitely sick in droves. I have three people I work with that are all out sick today with COVID. We all work remote but their families they live with are all sick. Omnicron is spreading like wildfire.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rdtwo 5y ago

It’s true, our child care collapsed. A bunch folks folks are sick at work either for actual sickness, to care for kids or a sick family member. It’s a cascade of institutional failures. Btw F-Npr they used to good but now it’s a New York Times like propaganda network.

relaytheurgency 5y ago
I don't think the opinion about the source is appropriate on Hacker News, but I can concur the child care problem is real and difficult. My child's classroom closed for a week because of a positive case. My child tested negative, so she can still potentially get sick which would cause _another_ closure plus she would have to quarantine for 10 days. There are 8 kids in the classroom, so I could be looking at losing 7*5+10 days of child care before this is over.
- D13Fd 5y ago
  Yes, the child care problem is huge. My kids' daycare is short-staffed due to staff being out sick, which means they have to combine the classrooms at times. Then when one child in a combined classroom tests positive for COVID, all of those kids--and all of the teachers--are sent home for the isolation period. This results in more short-staffing and more combined classrooms, which leads to even more opportunities for COVID exposure. It's a cascading failure, and it doesn't stop there. The parents end up watching their own kids and have to call out of work themselves (or work remotely at greatly reduced capacity).
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    It's a policy failure. Government should've paid a parent to stay home and provide childcare for their kids until under 5s could be vaccinated, instead of what we have now, which is a broken, dysfunctional childcare system attempting to keep itself together (and failing, both due to wages being too low to make the work worthwhile, spread of COVID, etc). I don't know how you convince anyone in the current environment to be a childcare provider or teacher, when there are robust alternative employment options available that pay more for a better work environment.

cafard 5y ago

"And at the community health center Mary's Center in Washington, D.C., half of the COVID-19 Response Team tested positive for the virus over the past few weeks." Mary's Center serves a population with low income, and probably sees bunches of small children. If you really want to catch COVID, Mary's Center is probably a great place to volunteer.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

My father in-law plows roads for the city during the winter. He was forced to take time off work and pay for a covid test out of pocket because he coughed during a lunch break at the station between routes. Why did he cough? Choked on a peanut in his lunch. Thankfully the union made sure he was reimbursed for his missed time - but I (anecdotally) know plenty of other people who were forced to stay home for some ridiculous reason or another. Another one off the top of my head was a spouse that tested positive on a rapid test, he tested negative, and neither of them had any symptoms at all but he was forced to quarantine. PCR test for the spouse ended up coming back negative - the rapid test was a false positive. Both missed 5 days of work with no union to fight for either of their wages. I've heard way too many stories like this to think this "sick worker crisis" is nothing but self-inflicted hysteria on the part of businesses.

andrewclunn 5y ago

Daughter and I both had covid last week. Omicron is gonna get everyone. There's no way to flatten this curve. At least it had the decency to hit its peek in January, after full time workers got their sick time replenished for the year.

brimble 5y ago
The reduction of recommended quarantine time was clearly an acknowledgement of this. Keeping it at two weeks with no way to significantly reduce infection rates would have led to a month of everything being shut down, and everyone still getting sick anyway. Hell, it may yet lead to a week or three of de facto shutdown, just from actual out-sick time. The folks in charge have given up, without explicitly saying so. [EDIT] For some evidence that we may get a de facto shutdown anyway: our (large) school district was short three hundred teachers the other day, and only managed to get one hundred subs. The schools are barely hanging on and shutting down or going remote for a week or two to cool things off and/or wait out the peak is a distinct possibility, which will have knock-on effects for the rest of the economy, which is also already dealing with high absence rates due to illness or direct exposure (which, with Omicron, is equivalent to "definitely has it, just waiting for symptoms").
- mml 5y ago
  my school district has been short 2-300 teachers ALL YEAR. my kid didn't have a math teacher for the first few months, then got one, who proceeded to quit a few weeks later. now math class is watching YouTube videos about math. or it would be, but the district just went remote...
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    100% a pay and working condition problem.
- nradov 5y ago
  In California anyone with a Bachelor's degree and clean background check can now sign up to be a temporary substitute teacher. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/01/11/governor-newsom-signs-executive-order-to-support-safe-in-person-learning-at-schools-amid-covid-surge/ https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/01/11/governor-newsom-signs-exec...

newsbinator 5y ago

> As a thank you to workers who have been putting in their hours and then some, MOM's introduced a $2 per hour bonus for all employees who complete their scheduled shifts within any pay period.

bagacrap 5y ago
this sounds like an incentive to come into work while sick
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Yep

wefarrell 5y ago

It's telling that 20 years after 9/11 we're still taking our shoes off at airports yet we still don't have federally mandated sick leave despite being two years into a pandemic that has been more fatal than 9/11 by several orders of magnitude.

beamatronic 5y ago
It's the will of the voters.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  That only works if you think we're truly represented by our representatives.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    "Truly" is doing a lot of work here, and creating an is/ought problem. Representatives do reflect the will of the people who elected them. The real problem is, on an individual level, your vote is statistically irrelevant, so it's easy to disassociate, and to blame "the others" who, collectively, have a vastly more powerful say over who represents you than you do. "They ought to vote more like how I want them to." you can say, "They don't vote correctly and I can't stop them, so it's the system's fault for giving them power over me!" This, of course, completely undermines the entire point of democracy, that it represents the collective will of the people, not any individual's arbitrary will. A representative democracy works even if you don't believe it does. It stops working if everyone doesn't believe it does, which is certainly not even close to the case in the US.
    - andrew_ 5y ago
      And if people believe that politicians are more about self-interest than representative interest and that it doesn't generally matter who is elected?
      - 5y ago

emptybottle 5y ago

Part of it must be the new relaxed measures that have been put in place at schools, and phasing out of contact tracing. Aside from people who are sick themselves, kids are getting sick causing parents to use sick leave to care for them at home (and exposing themselves to illness in the process) Complicate that by sick teachers and carers interrupting normal child care routines, also causing parents to miss work.

penjelly 5y ago

anecdote to add to others: i knew 1 person directly who might have had covid in the last two years (minus the last 2 months). in the last two months i know half a dozen confirmed sick, canada has limited testing capacity so it would probably be higher if we had that availability

werdnapk 5y ago

Is the term "calling out sick" regional or something? I've always said "calling in sick".

devin 5y ago
It does appear to be regional. Check out https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/call-in-sick-or-call-out-sick https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/call-in-...
thomascgalvin 5y ago
The difference is between "I'm calling [to tell you I'm] out sick" and "I'm calling in [to tell you I'll be out because I'm] sick."

TurkishPoptart 5y ago

In my state, we have a reduced "hospital capacity" because 3,000 nurses and other HCW were fired for not getting sufficiently "vaccinated". Now our governor (Inslee) is calling retired HCWs back into the workforce. Complete madness - not rooted in science, but in political science. Our country is due for a talk about natural immunity, especially when most of the people I know who've had 3 "vaccine" shots and still got covid. Are they now immune?

jrockway 5y ago
On a statistical level, the vaccines don't have to be 100% effective, and they aren't. For every person you hear about being sick after 3 doses, there are probably 10 people that would have gotten it, but didn't. If there was 10x less healthcare capacity, you can see why that would be a larger problem. That said, the vaccines do seem pretty focused on the 2019 variant of COVID-19. It's 2022 now, and that variant is dead. So we're definitely getting imperfect protection. (I got my 3rd dose anyway, of course. And I'm still treating the pandemic like a pandemic. I skipped holiday travel, I don't go out unless absolutely necessary, etc.)
- bigyellow 5y ago
  I like how vaccines can "probably" reduce chances of being sick, but saying vaccines "probably" have unknown long-term effects is heresy.
  - pacerwpg 5y ago
    We have evidence of one and not the other. It's really simple.
    - bigyellow 5y ago
      Exactly. We have no evidence of long-term effects, and are trusting the same people who told us a year ago that vaccines provide protection to tell us they're safe. It's asinine.
5y ago

samwillis 5y ago

To add an antidotal datapoint for the UK, 23 of the 35 kids in my daughters (7yo) school year tested positive for covid since last Monday. Both teachers and their two substitutes have also tested positive. I believe we are one of the worst hit years in the school but the others aren't that far behind. My daughter tested positive today. I believe the majority of parents are testing their kids with LFTs daily. Until now we had maybe had 2-3 in total all pandemic in the year group. The good news is it doesn't seem to be affecting parents much, even siblings don't seem to be necessarily going positive. At the rate its blowing through our school/town right now I would expect us here to be well past the worst of it in about three weeks.

wefarrell 5y ago
Omicron is less likely to show up on rapid tests and maybe there's a discrepancy in that tendency between adults and children. My wife and I got it on Christmas from my family. She, I, and all of my family members have had three vaccine doses. All of my rapid tests were negative but my PCR was positive.
- samwillis 5y ago
  I believe you are right, I think the only parents that are positive via LFTs are particularly symptomatic.
- christkv 5y ago
  This is pretty common from what I've been told the home tests must be taken right in the right infection window and most of them have a false negative somewhere between 7-10% and some even worse against omnicron.
laputan_machine 5y ago
We passed the peak over a week ago https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/, here's hoping we're close to the end...
- samwillis 5y ago

kemayo 5y ago

I don't like that they're sick, but I do like that sick workers are calling out. Ignoring the inherent effect of limited amounts of sick time that don't correspond in any way to how much you might get sick, there's a lot of pressure in some industries to still come in to work even if you're sick -- particularly, perversely, in some high-contact industries like nursing and food service. This has obvious negative consequences.

throwaway763 5y ago

In Australia, which seems to have put all its eggs in the vaccine basket, and squandered the last 2 years by doing almost zero prep for opening up, there are news reports about people who are confirmed covid cases are being asked to work in certain industries like meat processing. My wife works in childcare and isolating waiting for a result (36 hours and counting for a PCR test-in some states tests aren’t being processed for 7 days and then are thrown out) has been told by her supervisor that Covid-positive staff may have to work. We have a pack of RATs and she was negative on one, but they are extremely scarce, so we’re not using a second. Daycare and, soon, schools are going to allow covid to spread through with no mitigation attempts. The same lack of exposure to the world that allowed it to escape earlier waves has also led Australia to adopting extreme parodies of policies in place everywhere else: for example they opened up without any rapid testing and without improving PCR testing availability (you can’t get tested outside of weekday office hours). Lockdowns of any sort, school closures and remote learning have been a totally ruled out because that’s what the Australian state and federal governments imagine has happened in the rest of the world, despite the reality being more complex.

paulpauper 5y ago

Not a surprise. The only surprise is that it didn't happen sooner. The mass realization is setting in that: most jobs suck and are not worth the pay. People can hustle, find ways to make money or living arrangements that does not require a traditional job, such as gig work or living with friends or family.

gigel82 5y ago

Found the r/antiwork subreddit recently and it was quite illuminating to see the story from the actual workers' POV. People are sick, and their employers are asking them to come in anyway; the CDC move to 5-day quarantine is much less based in science than in "business needs".

bmlzootown 5y ago
From a worker's prospective, it sucks, but it's also rather bad from the employer's perspective as well (at least in my experience). Having to ask sick people to come in is not something I or my coworker want to do, but we're so low on staff right now that, if an individual tests negative and isn't running a fever, we need all the help we can get. Two other managers are currently out, multiple department heads and regular associates are out, and it's just the two of us running the show. I pulled a 12 hour shift Sunday just so said coworker could have a day off, and they're doing the same today for me. Just trying to open/close on time has been incredibly difficult lately, having to call around to cover morning/night shifts that people suddenly call out for. I'm not sure how much longer I can do this. I need this whole pandemic to come to a close solely for the sake of my own physical/mental wellbeing, if not also for everyone else's.
- nradov 5y ago
  If your store closed for a few hours would that really be a disaster? Would you manager actually fire you if you refuse to work that much overtime? You're not obligated to work yourself into a mental breakdown.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    A lot of stores could close temporarily without any real impact to society. At least for long enough to get over rona
    - danaris 5y ago
      ...provided their employees were still being paid.

standardUser 5y ago

We're averaging over 800,000 new cases every day. The previous high was just over 200,000 per day. So this is far and away the most cases we have ever seen, and it doesn't even count the mountain of at-home positives that never get reported. So none of this should be surprising at all. But rates of new cases are already plummeting in the places with the biggest Omicron peaks (the Northeast), so the "labor shortage" is a very short term issue, just like the various other "shortages" the media harps over, which all end up amounting to nothing but a brief inconvenience.

mcguire 5y ago
Remember back last year when the big issue was "Why are we shutting down? We should just go ahead and let it run its course!" Here's why we didn't: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases The peak number of cases reported daily in 2020 was in mid-December, at about 200,000. As standardUser says, we were having about 800,000 cases per day last week. On the other hand, we have vaccines now, and the current variant seems to be less deadly. As a result: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths_newhospitaladmissions https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths... Current new hospital admissions (right axis, completely different scale) are about 20,000 per day, versus 16,500 per day in early January 2021, and 1,700 deaths versus 3,000 last January.

irrational 5y ago

My family isn’t sick, but so many of my kids classmates and teachers are sick with Covid that they had to switch to all remote learning, right now just for this week. This has caused me to have to call in sick.

mcguire 5y ago

"As a thank you to workers who have been putting in their hours and then some, MOM's introduced a $2 per hour bonus for all employees who complete their scheduled shifts within any pay period." So they'll pay you an extra $2/hr to work sick? Nice.

nunez 5y ago

to be fair, i'm wondering how many of these people would have worked while sick before COVID made that untenable (voluntarily or otherwise)