All things Chinese CoronaVirus

[MDlaxfan76]

Our company bumped everyone back to Jan 4th.

Found this tidbit in Newsweek today:

Constitutional accountability is coming for the Biden administration's COVID-19 "emergency temporary standard" (ETS)—better known as Biden's vaccine mandate. The rule, which would require businesses with more than 100 employees to enforce vaccination or weekly testing starting January 4, has run into a maelstrom of legal and political opposition.

Since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) published the final ETS last Friday, at least 27 states and countless private plaintiffs from around the country filed lawsuits. If history is any guide, OSHA now faces an uphill climb to defend the rule. The agency is relying on the "emergency" authority that allows it to bypass normal procedural safeguards, but that courts have reviewed with a jaundiced eye. Of OSHA's nine previous uses of this authority, six were challenged in court and only one was fully upheld.

Certainly reasonable, what's the count up to now at your company Kram?...we're at 100% and have been since May. Boosters are on the docket next.

OSHA is required to take action if it sees serious risk to workers, but that doesn't mean they have much capacity to actually enforce the rules.

For instance, it's not as if OSHA can check every site where a hard hat is required to see if they're compliant. But what it does do is create a situation in which a whistle blower can bring OSHA in, or more relevantly can show that the employer wasn't following OSHA guidelines and injury resulted from that non-compliance. Liability.

And for those employers which actually want to comply, it provides a cover umbrella for insistence upon workers following OSHA rules.

But if a business does a fairly reasonable job of getting their people to get vaccinated or get tested and someone slips through a bit, not going to find OSHA swooping in to nail them. But there's some real liability if the employer decides to not require employees to do either, or even more flagrantly declares this non-compliance. And then someone dies...hoo boy, I don't want to be that employer.

Where I think the rule is weak, and may be best challenged legally, is that there's inadequate differentiation between work environments. A meat packing plant, for instance, is a way different environment than climbing a telephone pole. The cut-off at 100 employees, while intended to cut some slack on smaller employers, doesn't address the situation in which an employer has 50 workers congregated tightly in a poorly ventilated building...versus a larger company that does outdoors landscaping.

Here's the thing. It would be best for public health (and taxpayer expense) if everyone got vaccinated unless they had a very real medical issue that obviated against vaccination. And for those who have high exposure situations, it would be best if they were tested frequently as they could well be carriers, whether vaccinated or not. And it would be best if people wore masks in high congregation, poor ventilation areas...at least while there's significant prevalence of the virus in that area.

But how best to get folks to do these things?

I'm in favor of mandates, but rather than work related (other than risk of spread mitigation), I"d prefer to use access to things we'd like to do, but don't actually have to do.

We were at 40% vaccinated as of earlier this week. 30% of the religious exemptions have been processed so far.

We have not mentioned the January delay to any employees who have not asked, trying to keep them on the Dec glide path to bring about any issues sooner.

We are going to push to have a positive response from everyone so we can tell the gov, "yes" we are 100% compliant (either vaccinated or exempt) to avoid that 14K a day fine, and then we will deal with individual contract performance issues as they arise. We are going to have a handful of vaccinated people who are going to be doing all the work. And a lot of people who can no longer do their job on payrole. Unless the bases are more slack at allowing entry than they are saying.

Wow, that's worse than most of the worst counties in America.

With the 30% of the religious requests "processed", what's been the outcome of such? A handful accepted, the rest told they'll need to be vaccinated?

Good luck with this. Crazy.

We have a sit-down or call with those apply for a religious exemption.
Ask simple question- why is this against your beliefs?
Then we ask if they are wiling to mask and test.
All have said yes, so no issues yet.
All religious/medical exemptions accepted.

hmmm, do you expect that to cut it with access to base?
I seem to recall that was the biggest concern.

What % do you expect to thereby have exempted?
If just a small %, then I suspect no sweat...but if a large % then you do stand the risk of that "process" being challenged, whether by someone who gets sick, whether your employee or someone from them, or by the government. Simply waiving people through merely for a claim of a "belief" that is not consistent with any actual religious practices of the individuals could well be challenged as intentionally not compliant.

But if the testing and masking is done rigorously, and that's acceptable for on base access, seems like it could be sufficient, at least for the government...watch out for liability claims, though.

Tough spot...good luck.

Yes, access is the biggest concern. Right now there are no real access issues. We hope it keeps like that after the vaccine mandate.
We expect around 40-45% to be exempt.
No, we don't expect the process to be challenged because there is no mandated process. Internally we don't know what an audit would look like so it's pretty straight forward: either a vaccine card, DR's note, or an attestation.
That covers the Fed mandate and OSHA.
But Base access is very weird. And different from base to base, depending on where we are going on base. We work everywhere from office buildings to down range, and beyond security checkpoints. To be honest with you, Covid is the least deadly thing these guys are working with.

That's why I think the safety aspect should somehow be better attuned to the actual likelihood of large scale infection spread between different jobs and work environment...not all jobs require a hard hat. But while the odds of actually getting hit by a falling brick are pretty darn low, even in the most risky situations for such, the problem for the employer is that if they don't actually require, diligently, that the hard hats be worn in those situations, and an accident happens, there can be hell to pay.

But this is actually more akin to hygiene requirements, so for instance, requirements of hand washing, hair nets, etc when handling food, cleaning surfaces, all to reduce the chances of spreading a pathogen. It's less about the individual's risk than it is the risks to others.

So, the overall public health objective is to get as many people vaccinated as possible, and if not, tested with sufficient frequency to reduce outbreaks, and mask wearing when in dense situations...all of this being acutely needed when infections are high in a region, transmission risks therefore higher.

The other aspect of the vaccine priority is the stress, both personnel and financial, that preventable hospitalizations cause for health care workers and taxpayers. While it's clear that some people are far more prone to have a hospitalization situation, it's not remotely a perfect answer to simply not worry about younger and ostensibly healthier people...there are still far too many preventable hospitalizations among those groups. And it costs us all.

So, the government is looking to pull whatever levers it can to get that vaccination rate up super high. Short of an actual vaccine mandate.

What's bit surprising to me is that 40-45% of your employees simply don't care about the public health costs of their decision. Very few of those would have a legitimate medical basis for avoidance, yet they're going to claim a "belief" instead.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Our company bumped everyone back to Jan 4th.

Found this tidbit in Newsweek today:

Constitutional accountability is coming for the Biden administration's COVID-19 "emergency temporary standard" (ETS)—better known as Biden's vaccine mandate. The rule, which would require businesses with more than 100 employees to enforce vaccination or weekly testing starting January 4, has run into a maelstrom of legal and political opposition.

Since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) published the final ETS last Friday, at least 27 states and countless private plaintiffs from around the country filed lawsuits. If history is any guide, OSHA now faces an uphill climb to defend the rule. The agency is relying on the "emergency" authority that allows it to bypass normal procedural safeguards, but that courts have reviewed with a jaundiced eye. Of OSHA's nine previous uses of this authority, six were challenged in court and only one was fully upheld.

Certainly reasonable, what's the count up to now at your company Kram?...we're at 100% and have been since May. Boosters are on the docket next.

OSHA is required to take action if it sees serious risk to workers, but that doesn't mean they have much capacity to actually enforce the rules.

For instance, it's not as if OSHA can check every site where a hard hat is required to see if they're compliant. But what it does do is create a situation in which a whistle blower can bring OSHA in, or more relevantly can show that the employer wasn't following OSHA guidelines and injury resulted from that non-compliance. Liability.

And for those employers which actually want to comply, it provides a cover umbrella for insistence upon workers following OSHA rules.

But if a business does a fairly reasonable job of getting their people to get vaccinated or get tested and someone slips through a bit, not going to find OSHA swooping in to nail them. But there's some real liability if the employer decides to not require employees to do either, or even more flagrantly declares this non-compliance. And then someone dies...hoo boy, I don't want to be that employer.

Where I think the rule is weak, and may be best challenged legally, is that there's inadequate differentiation between work environments. A meat packing plant, for instance, is a way different environment than climbing a telephone pole. The cut-off at 100 employees, while intended to cut some slack on smaller employers, doesn't address the situation in which an employer has 50 workers congregated tightly in a poorly ventilated building...versus a larger company that does outdoors landscaping.

Here's the thing. It would be best for public health (and taxpayer expense) if everyone got vaccinated unless they had a very real medical issue that obviated against vaccination. And for those who have high exposure situations, it would be best if they were tested frequently as they could well be carriers, whether vaccinated or not. And it would be best if people wore masks in high congregation, poor ventilation areas...at least while there's significant prevalence of the virus in that area.

But how best to get folks to do these things?

I'm in favor of mandates, but rather than work related (other than risk of spread mitigation), I"d prefer to use access to things we'd like to do, but don't actually have to do.

We were at 40% vaccinated as of earlier this week. 30% of the religious exemptions have been processed so far.

We have not mentioned the January delay to any employees who have not asked, trying to keep them on the Dec glide path to bring about any issues sooner.

We are going to push to have a positive response from everyone so we can tell the gov, "yes" we are 100% compliant (either vaccinated or exempt) to avoid that 14K a day fine, and then we will deal with individual contract performance issues as they arise. We are going to have a handful of vaccinated people who are going to be doing all the work. And a lot of people who can no longer do their job on payrole. Unless the bases are more slack at allowing entry than they are saying.

Wow, that's worse than most of the worst counties in America.

With the 30% of the religious requests "processed", what's been the outcome of such? A handful accepted, the rest told they'll need to be vaccinated?

Good luck with this. Crazy.

We have a sit-down or call with those apply for a religious exemption.
Ask simple question- why is this against your beliefs?
Then we ask if they are wiling to mask and test.
All have said yes, so no issues yet.
All religious/medical exemptions accepted.

hmmm, do you expect that to cut it with access to base?
I seem to recall that was the biggest concern.

What % do you expect to thereby have exempted?
If just a small %, then I suspect no sweat...but if a large % then you do stand the risk of that "process" being challenged, whether by someone who gets sick, whether your employee or someone from them, or by the government. Simply waiving people through merely for a claim of a "belief" that is not consistent with any actual religious practices of the individuals could well be challenged as intentionally not compliant.

But if the testing and masking is done rigorously, and that's acceptable for on base access, seems like it could be sufficient, at least for the government...watch out for liability claims, though.

Tough spot...good luck.

Yes, access is the biggest concern. Right now there are no real access issues. We hope it keeps like that after the vaccine mandate.
We expect around 40-45% to be exempt.
No, we don't expect the process to be challenged because there is no mandated process. Internally we don't know what an audit would look like so it's pretty straight forward: either a vaccine card, DR's note, or an attestation.
That covers the Fed mandate and OSHA.
But Base access is very weird. And different from base to base, depending on where we are going on base. We work everywhere from office buildings to down range, and beyond security checkpoints. To be honest with you, Covid is the least deadly thing these guys are working with.

That's why I think the safety aspect should somehow be better attuned to the actual likelihood of large scale infection spread between different jobs and work environment...not all jobs require a hard hat. But while the odds of actually getting hit by a falling brick are pretty darn low, even in the most risky situations for such, the problem for the employer is that if they don't actually require, diligently, that the hard hats be worn in those situations, and an accident happens, there can be hell to pay.

But this is actually more akin to hygiene requirements, so for instance, requirements of hand washing, hair nets, etc when handling food, cleaning surfaces, all to reduce the chances of spreading a pathogen. It's less about the individual's risk than it is the risks to others.

So, the overall public health objective is to get as many people vaccinated as possible, and if not, tested with sufficient frequency to reduce outbreaks, and mask wearing when in dense situations...all of this being acutely needed when infections are high in a region, transmission risks therefore higher.

The other aspect of the vaccine priority is the stress, both personnel and financial, that preventable hospitalizations cause for health care workers and taxpayers. While it's clear that some people are far more prone to have a hospitalization situation, it's not remotely a perfect answer to simply not worry about younger and ostensibly healthier people...there are still far too many preventable hospitalizations among those groups. And it costs us all.

So, the government is looking to pull whatever levers it can to get that vaccination rate up super high. Short of an actual vaccine mandate.

What's bit surprising to me is that 40-45% of your employees simply don't care about the public health costs of their decision. Very few of those would have a legitimate medical basis for avoidance, yet they're going to claim a "belief" instead.

It’s kind of ridiculous that “I don’t believe in vaccines” is a legitimate cause for a religious exemption. Test them everyday.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/news/i ... -vaccines/

[Peter Brown]

Our company bumped everyone back to Jan 4th.

Found this tidbit in Newsweek today:

Constitutional accountability is coming for the Biden administration's COVID-19 "emergency temporary standard" (ETS)—better known as Biden's vaccine mandate. The rule, which would require businesses with more than 100 employees to enforce vaccination or weekly testing starting January 4, has run into a maelstrom of legal and political opposition.

Since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) published the final ETS last Friday, at least 27 states and countless private plaintiffs from around the country filed lawsuits. If history is any guide, OSHA now faces an uphill climb to defend the rule. The agency is relying on the "emergency" authority that allows it to bypass normal procedural safeguards, but that courts have reviewed with a jaundiced eye. Of OSHA's nine previous uses of this authority, six were challenged in court and only one was fully upheld.

Certainly reasonable, what's the count up to now at your company Kram?...we're at 100% and have been since May. Boosters are on the docket next.

OSHA is required to take action if it sees serious risk to workers, but that doesn't mean they have much capacity to actually enforce the rules.

For instance, it's not as if OSHA can check every site where a hard hat is required to see if they're compliant. But what it does do is create a situation in which a whistle blower can bring OSHA in, or more relevantly can show that the employer wasn't following OSHA guidelines and injury resulted from that non-compliance. Liability.

And for those employers which actually want to comply, it provides a cover umbrella for insistence upon workers following OSHA rules.

But if a business does a fairly reasonable job of getting their people to get vaccinated or get tested and someone slips through a bit, not going to find OSHA swooping in to nail them. But there's some real liability if the employer decides to not require employees to do either, or even more flagrantly declares this non-compliance. And then someone dies...hoo boy, I don't want to be that employer.

Where I think the rule is weak, and may be best challenged legally, is that there's inadequate differentiation between work environments. A meat packing plant, for instance, is a way different environment than climbing a telephone pole. The cut-off at 100 employees, while intended to cut some slack on smaller employers, doesn't address the situation in which an employer has 50 workers congregated tightly in a poorly ventilated building...versus a larger company that does outdoors landscaping.

Here's the thing. It would be best for public health (and taxpayer expense) if everyone got vaccinated unless they had a very real medical issue that obviated against vaccination. And for those who have high exposure situations, it would be best if they were tested frequently as they could well be carriers, whether vaccinated or not. And it would be best if people wore masks in high congregation, poor ventilation areas...at least while there's significant prevalence of the virus in that area.

But how best to get folks to do these things?

I'm in favor of mandates, but rather than work related (other than risk of spread mitigation), I"d prefer to use access to things we'd like to do, but don't actually have to do.

We were at 40% vaccinated as of earlier this week. 30% of the religious exemptions have been processed so far.

We have not mentioned the January delay to any employees who have not asked, trying to keep them on the Dec glide path to bring about any issues sooner.

We are going to push to have a positive response from everyone so we can tell the gov, "yes" we are 100% compliant (either vaccinated or exempt) to avoid that 14K a day fine, and then we will deal with individual contract performance issues as they arise. We are going to have a handful of vaccinated people who are going to be doing all the work. And a lot of people who can no longer do their job on payrole. Unless the bases are more slack at allowing entry than they are saying.

Wow, that's worse than most of the worst counties in America.

With the 30% of the religious requests "processed", what's been the outcome of such? A handful accepted, the rest told they'll need to be vaccinated?

Good luck with this. Crazy.

We have a sit-down or call with those apply for a religious exemption.
Ask simple question- why is this against your beliefs?
Then we ask if they are wiling to mask and test.
All have said yes, so no issues yet.
All religious/medical exemptions accepted.

hmmm, do you expect that to cut it with access to base?
I seem to recall that was the biggest concern.

What % do you expect to thereby have exempted?
If just a small %, then I suspect no sweat...but if a large % then you do stand the risk of that "process" being challenged, whether by someone who gets sick, whether your employee or someone from them, or by the government. Simply waiving people through merely for a claim of a "belief" that is not consistent with any actual religious practices of the individuals could well be challenged as intentionally not compliant.

But if the testing and masking is done rigorously, and that's acceptable for on base access, seems like it could be sufficient, at least for the government...watch out for liability claims, though.

Tough spot...good luck.

Yes, access is the biggest concern. Right now there are no real access issues. We hope it keeps like that after the vaccine mandate.
We expect around 40-45% to be exempt.
No, we don't expect the process to be challenged because there is no mandated process. Internally we don't know what an audit would look like so it's pretty straight forward: either a vaccine card, DR's note, or an attestation.
That covers the Fed mandate and OSHA.
But Base access is very weird. And different from base to base, depending on where we are going on base. We work everywhere from office buildings to down range, and beyond security checkpoints. To be honest with you, Covid is the least deadly thing these guys are working with.

That's why I think the safety aspect should somehow be better attuned to the actual likelihood of large scale infection spread between different jobs and work environment...not all jobs require a hard hat. But while the odds of actually getting hit by a falling brick are pretty darn low, even in the most risky situations for such, the problem for the employer is that if they don't actually require, diligently, that the hard hats be worn in those situations, and an accident happens, there can be hell to pay.

But this is actually more akin to hygiene requirements, so for instance, requirements of hand washing, hair nets, etc when handling food, cleaning surfaces, all to reduce the chances of spreading a pathogen. It's less about the individual's risk than it is the risks to others.

So, the overall public health objective is to get as many people vaccinated as possible, and if not, tested with sufficient frequency to reduce outbreaks, and mask wearing when in dense situations...all of this being acutely needed when infections are high in a region, transmission risks therefore higher.

The other aspect of the vaccine priority is the stress, both personnel and financial, that preventable hospitalizations cause for health care workers and taxpayers. While it's clear that some people are far more prone to have a hospitalization situation, it's not remotely a perfect answer to simply not worry about younger and ostensibly healthier people...there are still far too many preventable hospitalizations among those groups. And it costs us all.

So, the government is looking to pull whatever levers it can to get that vaccination rate up super high. Short of an actual vaccine mandate.

What's bit surprising to me is that 40-45% of your employees simply don't care about the public health costs of their decision. Very few of those would have a legitimate medical basis for avoidance, yet they're going to claim a "belief" instead.

It’s kind of ridiculous that “I don’t believe in vaccines” is a legitimate cause for a religious exemption. Test them everyday.

Should we test the vaccinated as well, since they’re equally likely to carry the virus as the unvaccinated?

Also, now that we know that the unvaccinated but previously infected have better immunity than the vaccinated, shouldn’t we start quarantining the vaccinated?

[youthathletics]

We should be moving to testing antibodies

[Peter Brown]

We should be moving to testing antibodies

Exactly.

[NattyBohChamps04]

A significant number of people may not have antibodies...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... inds-study

[youthathletics]

Even better

[NattyBohChamps04]

I don't care enough...

[youthathletics]

The ole' bait and switch...two usernames of the same person contradicting each other. The games people play. SMH

[wgdsr]

https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/news/i ... -vaccines/

give it up. no one's seriously talking about natural immunity until mandates run their course.

i'm surprised we even had the one week news cycle on it where our heads had to address a question on it.

[wgdsr]

A significant number of people may not have antibodies...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... inds-study

true. t-cell evidence was pretty available in 2020.

[NattyBohChamps04]

The ole' bait and switch...two usernames of the same person contradicting each other. The games people play. SMH

Looks like more data is needed. Who's alt account am I now? I thought I was supposed to be one of the Cornell guys.

[youthathletics]

The ole' bait and switch...two usernames of the same person contradicting each other. The games people play. SMH

Looks like more data is needed. Who's alt account am I now? I thought I was supposed to be one of the Cornell guys.

How'd you know I was talking you?...caught ya red handed.

[NattyBohChamps04]

The ole' bait and switch...two usernames of the same person contradicting each other. The games people play. SMH

Looks like more data is needed. Who's alt account am I now? I thought I was supposed to be one of the Cornell guys.

How'd you know I was talking you?...caught ya red handed.

I didn't, but you posted right after me, which is a slight hint. Plus I've heard one or two other people say I'm supposedly a duplicate of some other poster here.

It's all kinda funny. I'm actually a dog.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/news/i ... -vaccines/

give it up. no one's seriously talking about natural immunity until mandates run their course.

i'm surprised we even had the one week news cycle on it where our heads had to address a question on it.

Just happened to run across it. Good hoops game tonight. It’s late but I may try to catch it. UCLA vs ‘Nova

[wgdsr]

The ole' bait and switch...two usernames of the same person contradicting each other. The games people play. SMH

Looks like more data is needed. Who's alt account am I now? I thought I was supposed to be one of the Cornell guys.

How'd you know I was talking you?...caught ya red handed.

I didn't, but you posted right after me, which is a slight hint. Plus I've heard one or two other people say I'm supposedly a duplicate of some other poster here.

It's all kinda funny. I'm actually a dog.

i always thought you were a cat.

[wgdsr]

https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/news/i ... -vaccines/

give it up. no one's seriously talking about natural immunity until mandates run their course.

i'm surprised we even had the one week news cycle on it where our heads had to address a question on it.

Just happened to run across it. Good hoops game tonight. It’s late but I may try to catch it. UCLA vs ‘Nova

i do wanna see ucla, they're supposed to be odds on. villanova sounds like a good matchup. thanks.

[Bart]

We should be moving to testing antibodies

Why would you test for antibodies if you are testing to "stay" so you can work? Antibody tests do nothing to tell is a worker is contagious or not. You'd be better off using lateral flow antigen tests.

If this is not what you were alluding to (test to work) then please forget the previous blather........

[MDlaxfan76]

Not really surprising, but still disgraceful.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/12/politics ... index.html