COVID-19 has cost LAFD $22.5 million in overtime, much of it to cover for sick firefighters

The Los Angeles Fire Department has spent more than $22.5 million on overtime related to COVID-19, much of it to backfill the shifts of employees who fell ill or had to quarantine after an exposure to the virus, data reviewed by The Times show.

The numbers underscore the toll that the coronavirus is taking on Fire Department staffing amid a battle over the city mandate that employees receive vaccinations. Only about 70% of LAFD workers have been fully vaccinated, and some firefighters and union officials have warned of major staffing problems if large numbers of personnel refuse to comply with the mandate.

But the data, which The Times obtained under the California Public Records Act, show the lost time due to COVID-19 illness is already substantial, accounting for more than 400,000 hours of work completed between March 2020 and Oct. 9 of this year.

While firefighters and their union have sued over the mandate and warned of slowed response times if it is implemented in full, far less has been said about these ever-growing costs of an undervaccinated workforce — which medical experts and ethicists said is a mistake.

“One of the things we ignore is, what’s the burden of people being sick and being out? That doesn’t seem to be tabulated or at least expressed clearly in all of the discussions about city workers refusing to be vaccinated,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. “Not only are they burdening us with the threat of spreading disease, but selfishly they are burdening the taxpayer with the cost of having to fill in for them.”

Dr. John Swartzberg, a clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health who has long taught on infectious disease and vaccine hesitancy, said national and international corporations he has advised through the pandemic have already reached the conclusion that vaccination mandates are not only good public policy but good for business — specifically because they reduce the costs associated with managing quarantines and paying for overtime.

The same reasoning applies to public agencies, he said.

“It’s going to allow them to have a stable workforce, and that stable workforce is created in part because you won’t have so many people going out on quarantine, and far fewer people going out ill,” Swartzberg said.

Cecile Aguirre, a fiscal systems specialist with the Fire Department who helped compile the data, said the numbers captured all overtime costs filed under a budget category for “COVID-19 activity.” While the figures could include some overtime worked by LAFD members at testing or vaccination sites, they largely represented hours worked by members who were filling in for others who had fallen ill with COVID-19 or were exposed to it and quarantining, Aguirre said.

She said she could not provide a more precise breakdown given limitations of the department’s financial tracking software.

The Fire Department said in a statement that it has had to increase overtime hours in light of demands associated with the coronavirus, and is keeping track of such expenses in order to seek federal reimbursement where possible.

The department said what effect the vaccine mandate will have on staffing is “still undetermined,” but if it “creates an unusually high number of vacancies,” the department would consider temporarily closing individual fire companies.

The department did not address the staffing gains it might experience from a vaccinated workforce, and directed other questions to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office.