On the front lines of the pandemic, grocery workers are in the dark about risks
By the end of April, employees at a Walmart in Quincy, Mass., were panicking: Sick colleagues kept showing up at work. Other employees disappeared without explanation. The store’s longtime greeter was in the hospital and on a ventilator, dying from covid-19.
Local health officials grew alarmed as employees and their relatives reported sick co-workers. Shoppers called to complain about crowded conditions.
“We have had consistent problems with Walmart,” wrote Ruth Jones, Quincy’s health commissioner, in an April 28 email to the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. “They have a cluster of Covid cases among employees and have not been cooperative in giving us contact information or in following proper quarantine and isolation guidelines.”
The next day, at another Walmart in Worcester, Mass., a local public health director ordered a shut down after obtaining an internal company list showing nearly two dozen employees had tested positive.
Health officials in the two cities pressed the nation’s largest grocer to test all of its employees at the two stores for coronavirus. The screenings, which began within days in the store parking lots, helped confirm a wider problem: 119 of the workers were infected, according to health officials.
Despite the pandemic, grocery stores generally are not required to publicly disclose cases of coronavirus involving employees or report them to the local health departments. As states now move to reopen, many grocers are being criticized by health officials, lawmakers and store employees for not being more open with the public and their own workers about outbreaks within their stores. [Continue reading…]
Two Missouri hairstylists potentially exposed 140 clients to coronavirus when they worked for up to eight days this month while symptomatic, health officials said.
The Springfield-Greene Health Department announced Saturday that a second hairstylist tested positive for coronavirus, and may have exposed 56 clients at the same Great Clips salon. [Continue reading…]