The following is a special issue of the COVID-19 update.
COVID-19-positive employees must stay home
We’re a few weeks into transitioning teleworking employees back to more regular onsite work, and we’re adjusting to having more people in our facilities again. The Incident Command team has received considerable feedback from our employees, with questions about safety and support. We’re keenly aware the potential risks having more people onsite pose, especially for our frontline employees who must report onsite daily.
We wanted to give you a few tangible updates and some other advice.
- You must stay home if you’re sick or test positive for COVID-19.
- Talk with your manager and notify close contacts.
- Take care onsite – consider masking and distancing.
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If you test positive, stay home
First up, if you test positive for COVID-19 you must stay home from work for at least five days. Employees who can telework, should telework. We have revisited our prior guidance and we are revising it to better align with our policies that detail our commitment to a healthy work environment.
If you have tested positive for COVID-19 and you come into work, you will be sent home. You must follow CDC guidelines for isolating and monitoring symptoms.
- Stay home for at least five days if you test positive for COVID-19. Wear a mask if you must be around others in your home. Do not travel.
- If you test positive and have symptoms, stay home for at least five days and continue to isolate until you are fever-free for 24 hours, without the aid of fever-reducing medication, and your other symptoms are improving.
- Continue to take precautions until day 10, including continuing to wear a well-fitting mask.
- Individuals who have a weakened immune system should isolate for at least 10 days.
If you’re sick, stay home
You need to stay home if you feel sick and/or show symptoms of any kind. Your symptoms may not seem like COVID-19, but it doesn’t matter – when you’re sick, you can make others sick. Stay home. If you come to work and you’re visibly sick, you may be asked to go home.
Notify your manager
If you have tested positive for COVID-19, contact your manager and coordinate your work schedule for the period of time you need to stay home and/or telework, if you are able. Managers should be flexible to allow teleworking where business needs allow.
- You and your manager will work together to determine how to notify any close contacts at work (see below for further guidance). In some work units, managers have been instructed to be the one to notify close contacts; however, in many cases, you will be informing close contacts yourself.
- Managers should limit communication about positive cases to those immediately affected, according to CDC definitions of close contact. Managers must not reveal the identity of the individual who tested positive.
- Inform employees who may have had close contact and provide CDC advice about whether they need to isolate and test.
- We have put together a sample exposure notification we encourage you to use to notify staff. You can grab this text and fill in the placeholders and adjust as needed.
Notify your close contacts
If a person is infected, they could spread COVID-19 starting two days before they have any symptoms or test positive. It’s important to notify anyone who you have been in close contact with at work that they might have been exposed to COVID-19.
- You are not required to explicitly identify that you have tested positive to your coworkers. It is up to you how you communicate the risk. You can voluntarily identify and notify your close contacts, you can use the CDC tools (in the next bullet) to notify them anonymously, or you can ask your manager to help you notify your close contacts.
- The CDC has detailed advice about telling your close contacts and a tool that allows you to notify close contacts while remaining anonymous.
- A close contact is anyone who is less than 6 feet away from you for a combined total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period. On the webpage linked here, the CDC provides additional details for determining who your close contacts are and how to gauge whether you were contagious prior to experiencing symptoms.
Get tested
When in doubt, get tested. You can still spread the virus to others even when you don’t show symptoms. You may not register a positive test for at least five days after being exposed to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19, so isolate yourself, then test, and watch for symptoms for at least 10 days.
COVID-19 testing resources:
Mask, distance onsite; telework if you can
Individual employees should feel free to wear a mask and practice distancing when onsite. Other employees and managers should respect individual decisions and make every effort to help facilitate distancing by having meetings in smaller groups, in larger conferences rooms, or by allowing for hybrid meetings and remote participation.
We encourage you to telework if you can if you need to stay home due to a positive test, being sick, or being exposed.
If you cannot telework or you are too sick to work remotely, you will need to use paid time off or sick time. If you do not have paid time off or sick time, you will receive approved unpaid leave.
We encourage managers and employees to use flexibility in teleworking where business needs allow.
Review information on community levels and transmission
Our Incident Command leaders are still monitoring trends reported on the CDC COVID-19 data tracker website, guidance from the Minnesota Department of Health, COVID-19 wastewater data that our Environmental Services group is producing, as well as guidance from the state and other public entities. We will make adjustments to our procedures when warranted.
(For more information about how these rates are calculated, visit the CDC’s website. There’s a detailed explanation that lends context to the numbers for community transmission and community levels, the latter of which takes hospital capacity, vaccination rates, numbers of immune-compromised individuals, and previous positive cases into account. The site notes that state and local health departments may have more accurate numbers about relative risk.)
As public health officials remind us daily, we’re still experiencing a pandemic and need to carefully monitor the situation, which we are doing. We are prepared to make adjustments where necessary. Thank you for submitting your concerns to the COVID-19 form so we can hear from staff.
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