Surprise, they are not helpful.
Like many different states, the state I live in has had its fair share of struggles when it came to Covid. The new Omicron variant has not helped the situation, and has helped cause 20% of all health care workers to quit.
In fact, New Hampshire leads the country in new Covid cases per capita as of late. For a small state like NH, the exit of healthcare workers and less resources compared to that of a bigger state has left them in a bad place. I have had the chance to see this first hand.
I am currently working at a hospital in Southern NH entering in data regarding Covid cases. Specifically, I track the number of employees who test positive for Covid, are vaccinated and unvaccinated, and all things regarding employee health. Before these new guidelines the CDC put out, things were very busy. With only one full time nurse working in the office, many people have had to wait to be tested and were forced to miss multiple days of work as there was no time to screen them before coming back to work.
As a result, the hospital was short staffed and was running out of room to put patients who needed to be admitted. The hospital is very clever in how they come up with solutions to the problem. This made them float above water for a little longer.
That is, until the new guidelines came out.
Now, employees who test positive for Covid can still work. Yes, you can read that that last sentence again if you need to. This means you can have an ICU nurse who tested positive working with the sickest and most at risk patients that the hospital has.
The CDC states that as long five days has passed since the patient has had symptoms, has not had a fever in 24 hours, and symptoms have improved, the medical professional is cleared to return to work.
We know at this point that there are asymptomatic people who just don't get it as bad as others. So for example, if someone goes and gets tested for any reason besides having symptoms, such as being in close proximity with someone who did test positive, they can return to work immediately even if they tested positive.
They can test positive at 5am and be in working at 9am, so long as they are not having any symptoms OR had symptoms start five days ago but are now improving. They can still have a cough but if its been five days and the cough is improving, the CDC says they are allowed to return to work.
I understand why they may have changed these guidelines. As stated earlier, many nurses and doctors have become sick, and when they did they were forced to sit out 10 days. This made it harder on the hospital to cover these missed shifts.
Now, healthcare workers can still show up to work even if they are positive and only need to wait five days maximum in some cases before returning to work. I get it. I’ve seen the department managers struggle and ask the nurse in my department when a certain employee can return.
That is their number one priority. When can their employee come back to work and do their job so that the department can function as normal once again?
The problem with this is that it will only lead to more infections as employees will now be working when they are sick. I think this new policy will make the problem worse and make the next few weeks and months much, much worse.
Managers need to understand that they can not have sick employees retuning to work and affecting patients and fellow coworkers. It’s a pandemic, and they need to focus on what they have and performing their best despite having less help.
Hopefully, my hospital and all the other hospitals do not follow the CDC.
I am afraid of what will happen if they do.
