San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
World is off its axis after 7 months of pandemic
Remember certainty and freedom from fear? Those were nice.
Remember when work was a mostly stable and fear-free zone? At least for those of us lucky enough to have safe, decent-paying jobs.
For many people, the question of where they will work in the weeks and months ahead is still up in the air.
If you’re working from home, odds are you don’t expect to go back to your workplace until after New Year’s.
A new survey by the Conference Board, a New York-based economic research group, found that only 28 percent of homebound employees think they’ll return to work by Dec. 31. Another 30 percent said they might go back sometime in the first three months of 2021.
The latter is our situation at the Express-News, except for the men and women who print, bundle and deliver the newspaper. They’ve been showing up for work all along — for which we are profoundly grateful. As for the rest of
us, we know we’ll return to the newsroom after Jan. 1, though we don’t know when exactly.
(A quick aside: Until I had to set up a home office, a space that facilitates staring out the window a lot, I did not know that brushing one’s teeth and driving — at the same time — was something people did. I’ve witnessed this treacherous act four times on my street since April. The world is clearly off its
axis.)
The Conference Board survey found a divide between lower-level employees and the executives who make the decisions. Rank-and-file workers feel less comfortable about returning to work than do their bosses — by a margin of nine percentage points.
“These cohorts are less likely to be involved with planning the return,” said Rebecca Ray, executive vice president of human
capital at the Conference Board. “Without a continuous dialogue, and in many cases the lack of a detailed plan about returning to the workplace, it comes as no surprise that these workers are more apprehensive.”
The uncertainty and worry that remote workers feel, however, pales in comparison with the fear experienced by the many people who have already returned to the office, factory floor, restaurant or store. Despite masks, social distancing and little bottles of hand sanitizer, they’re at greater risk of catching the virus just by going to work and dealing directly with co-workers and customers.
President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been appalling. But at least he did what he could to help Americans prepare for the pandemic, emotionally if not practically. His presidency has been about chaos and fear. Imagine what our reaction to the COVID-19 crisis would have been without that preparation.
The fear and uncertainty we’re living with is affecting more than our jobs and relationships. It’s holding back the economic recovery.
Even as businesses continue to reopen and state and local governments ease capacity restrictions, many of us remain wary. To a great extent, “eating out” continues to mean eating out of the box that the Uber Eats driver just delivered.
This is why we should pay close attention to what Community Labs is up to.
This is the nonprofit that Rackspace Technology co-founder Graham Weston muscled into existence last month, with help from the Tobin Endowment and the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation. Its mission is to provide low-cost, frequent, rapid COVID-19 testing on a large scale.
The idea is to identify symptom-free carriers of the coronavirus so they can be quarantined. Seeded with $2.5 million, the lab has the equipment to process as many as 24,000 tests per day.
Weston has said he expects Community Labs to spend most of its time testing schools, which generally make viruses giddy with anticipation. Community Labs is conducting its pilot program at Somerset Independent School District in rural southwest Bexar County.
“That’s why we’re focusing on schools first — because we get a two-for-one benefit,” Weston told me recently. “We get the kids back to school, and we get the parents back to work.”
Community Labs also has partnered with the Metropolitan Health District to increase free testing for the asymptomatics among us.
Its underlying objective is to reduce fear and uncertainty. That’s why it’s called assurance testing.
“It greatly decreases the likelihood of future lockdowns because you’re trying to identify the people that are silent spreaders,” Weston said.
“And everybody else can go back to work.”