What to Do If Your Employee Is Exposed to Coronavirus
For business owners, the biggest question of 2021 is still: What to do if your employee is exposed to coronavirus?
After a year of sheltering in place, businesses are finally ready to bring their employees back to the workplace in-person. And with vaccines becoming more widely available, the end is seemingly in site. But the world isn’t quite out of the clear when it comes to figuring out the best way to return to work and it’s clear that adjusting to the new normal won’t be as seamless as some might think.
If your company is considering returning to work in person, you don’t want to be caught off guard by unexpected exposure and not have a plan in place. Before you announce your grand reopening and roll out the red carpet to welcome your employees back, you should fully be prepared to implement new procedures that may need to be long term. By anticipating issues and planning procedures, you’ll be one step ahead of the curve, protecting your employees and your business.
Below is a comprehensive guide to explain what to do if your employee is exposed to coronavirus.
Your employees’ health is important. Find out what to do now.
When preparing for your employees to come back to the office, it is important to have a back-to-work plan that keeps COVID-19 in mind. At this stage in the game, you can expect that one or several of your employees have either tested positive or know someone who has tested positive for the coronavirus.
You have to think about what to do if your employee is exposed to coronavirus in actionable terms. Let’s take a look at some of the issues you may have to deal with when accepting employees back into the workplace.
Possible Employee Scenarios
The first step of any post and current coronavirus return-to-work plan is to review the material provided by the U.S government as the standard procedures. Look at the latest version of the guide provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC outlines the differing scenarios of possible exposure to take the guesswork out of quarantining duration and offer a certain level of understanding for employees to determine their levels of exposure. Using CDC guidelines takes a lot of guesswork out of the process and provides you with a logical framework for your decisions.
When you open up your office, your employees might come to you with any of the following scenarios.
“I’ve had symptoms of the coronavirus and might’ve tested positive.”
Believe it or not, this might be the position most common for your employees. In 2020, people were cautioned not to seek formal treatment from hospitals from fear of spreading the virus to people with pre-existing conditions. There was also a shortage of coronavirus tests available, so it’s completely possible that your employee had exposure, but never sought treatment or came in contact with the virus.
