News that the Omicron surge is subsiding is more than welcome from a public exhausted by two years of pandemic precautions and restrictions. As we enter the third and, hopefully, final year of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have learned a lot about how the virus infects people, how to stay safe, and what measures need to be implemented for long-term safety in crowded and busy environments like manufacturing workplaces, airports, and healthcare settings.
What Omicron changed
By mid-2021, as the U.S. was slowly getting vaccinated, the assumption was that fully vaccinated individuals were mostly protected from the worst effects of COVID-19, if not fully safe from infection at all. By the summer, precautions had lessened and public health guidance seemed less urgent. Then the Omicron variant struck, bringing with it a record number of breakthrough cases in vaccinated and boosted individuals. This drove scientists and health officials back to the drawing board to reevaluate what protections and precautions were needed in the face of this new variant. While vaccinated individuals fared better in terms of hospitalizations, the numbers were higher than expected when it came to breakthrough cases. At the peak in January 2022, the U.S. was experiencing 1,467 breakthrough cases in the fully vaccinated per 100,000 people(1). While these numbers were still far below the rates seen among unvaccinated individuals (3,230 cases per 100,000), Omicron shattered the idea that COVID-19 was now a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Many corporate offices had to backtrack on their return to office plans due to the Omicron surge. A mid-December 2021 Gartner survey found 44% (2) of companies had pushed back or altered their reopening plans. In-person meetings and conferences had to be canceled, and work from home flexibility extended.
The manufacturing sector was hit especially hard by Omicron as work from home flexibility is generally nonexistent. According to a survey done by IHS Markit (3), manufacturing output grew slowly but steadily throughout 2021, but then Omicron took that progress out at the knees with growth in manufacturing output hitting a 19-month low in January 2022. Precipitating this slowdown is, of course, a lack of workers. The manufacturing sector is still over 200,000 workers shy of where it was in 2020, pre-pandemic. This means workers’ health and safety will be a driving force in attracting and maintaining the workforce necessary to recover lost productivity.
Public health is the new normal
What would have been unthinkable in early 2020 is now very much an accepted reality. Many of us have accepted masking and testing as a necessary part of our daily lives in the face of a virus that we have watched change the way every major institution acts and keeps people safe. Just because city and state governments are relaxing mask mandates doesn’t mean the pandemic is over, or that the threat has been neutralized. Large settings like airports, healthcare facilities, and public transportation agencies may continue to require some degree of precaution, and for good reason. New variants can always crop up, as we are currently seeing with the latest Omicron sub-lineages BA.1 and BA.2, which are causing massive disruption in Hong Kong and across Europe, having become the dominant variant in a matter of weeks. (4) We can expect the emergence of new variants to be part of the new normal. Exactly what those variants will look like or how they will differ from the version of the virus we are dealing with today is anyone’s guess.
Staying vigilant
As pandemic precautions fall away, testing may be the best way to maintain worker safety going forward. A survey of 543 U.S. employers conducted by the Harvard Business Review (5) found that 84% of respondents said they plan to offer regular testing of all employees. Of the employers that plan to offer testing, 80% said they intend to do it at least weekly. The leading choice for COVID-19 testing is PCR testing, which is the gold standard. We know that Omicron has shown the capability to infect vaccinated individuals who can then still spread the virus to other workers regardless of vaccination status. Having a testing strategy in place will be the only way to know for sure that your workforce is healthy enough to be in congregate settings, and research shows that employees are expecting a level of vigilance from their employers. A January 2022 Ipsos poll of 1,001 employees across the U.S. found that 60% of employees supported employers requiring or encouraging testing before entering the workplace. (6) While it isn’t the expectation that employers will need to test their workforce every week indefinitely, employers should look at how their testing strategy could change as the pandemic evolves and when disease prevalence is low and getting lower. This could be a shift to monitoring for COVID-19 in the workplace by regular testing of the air, rather than employees. A strategy like this could include having on-demand testing available on-site to quickly address anyone with symptoms. Such monitoring would allow employers to know when they need to adjust their mitigation strategy.
The endemic phase of the pandemic for employers will be about finding the right balance of protecting employees while preserving productivity – all while not taking on undue burden when it comes to the cost of safety measures.
For more information on how Thermo Fisher is helping companies navigate the pandemic please visit www.thermofisher.com/workplace
(1) https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status
(2) https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/dos-and-donts-for-announcing-return-to-work-plans
(3)https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/24/manufacturing-growth-slows-as-workers-get-omicron/
(4)https://www.who.int/news/item/22-02-2022-statement-on-omicron-sublineage-ba
(5)https://hbr.org/2021/12/the-omicron-variant-how-companies-should-respond
(6)https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/omicron-triggers-return-to-workplace-concerns-for-more-than-half-of-us-workforce-301463923.html
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