Postal workers falling sick, but colleagues still work and worry
Chris Jackson was halfway through his overnight shift sorting the mail for delivery when he and several colleagues were summoned into a windowless conference room.
The senior manager of the mail facility was there along with a representative from the union and other postal officials.
They confirmed the rumors that had been swirling all night. One of their colleagues in the Bethlehem, Pa., mail facility had been diagnosed with COVID-19.
They gave the staff the option of going home, and about half did. But the facility wasn’t going to shut down. Instead, they set up cones around the area where the sick worker had been, and the overnight crew continued until dawn preparing the mail to be sent to people’s homes.
“They said we need to have the delivery trucks out there,” Jackson said. “They said delivery trucks really instill confidence that it’s business as usual, that the mail is still getting to you.”
Neither sleet nor snow — nor the coronavirus. With tens of millions of people across huge swathes of the country on state-ordered lockdown, the mail has remained one of the few physical tethers to the wider world. Medicine, packages bought online, at-home coronavirus tests, even mail-in presidential ballots — all require a reliable federal mail system.
But mail delivery requires a healthy workforce, and postal workers have been falling sick across the country — Miami; Manhattan; Seattle; Portland, Ore., and more have reported sick workers, according to Paul Hogrogian, national president of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union.
On Thursday, 13 postal workers had tested positive; by Friday, that number was 20, including the one from the Bethlehem facility where Jackson works, according to Hogrogian. On Sunday, postal officials in Washington said the number was “fewer than 30.”
With a workforce of 630,000, those numbers are still relatively small, but they are expected to keep rising in the coming days and weeks. Jackson and other rank-and-file postal workers worry that the USPS isn’t doing enough to protect them and that they could become unwitting carriers of the virus. “They had no plan, and they weren’t proactive at all,” Jackson said. “It was just crazy to me.”
When Jackson returned to work the night after the meeting, he said the cones had been removed from the sick worker’s station, and the crew was expected to keep going.
Another Bethlehem colleague, Sean Craig, said he’s continuing to report for work but is worried about his infant son and his 82-year-old mother.
“The concern is there just wasn’t a plan in place,” Craig said. “It was fly by the seat of your pants, which made me very angry.”
In a message to postal employees last week, Megan J. Brennan, the postmaster general, said that “there is no evidence the virus can spread through the mail.” A recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine suggests that the virus disintegrates over the course of a day on cardboard.
But direct handling of the mail is only one aspect of the job inside postal facilities. Hundreds of people rotate through most warehouses, handling equipment, loading trucks, and preparing the mail to be delivered door to door by letter carriers who in turn fan out to homes across their area. That leaves plenty of opportunities to spread the disease, Jackson said, and there hasn’t been enough planning or support.