Staff Infections

 

“It was gross… I lost my appetite that day… I get worried because I know 

I need the work, but the harder I work, the more work they have for me.” 

English translation of the words from Hollywood’s Hilton Garden Inn housekeeper, 

Cristina Velasquez, after a particularly difficult post-visit clean-up

We are all acutely aware of the millions of unfilled jobs across the country, massive shortages of qualified hospital workers – from doctors, nurses and medical technicians down to cleaning and food prep employees – a dearth of dockworkers and truck drivers, severe cutbacks in the numbers of available first responders, teachers fighting back again live classrooms with unvaccinated children (e.g., the Chicago walkout), flight cancelations from too many infected pilots and flight attendants, and a shuddering reluctance of too many factory and office workers to return to their on-site jobs. Anyone suggesting that our economy is best suited to a wide-open mandate-free (vaccines and masks) is apparently acutely unaware of the supply chain and general worker unwillingness/ability to resume normalcy. 

Those who ignorantly suggest that just letting Omicron infect the remaining unvaccinated Americans to create “nature’s natural herd immunity” apparently do not care about the mortality rates and hospitalizations of the unvaccinated and are apparently willing to wait an incalculable lingering time for our economy to restore itself. A majority of medical experts believe that while we will generate an increasing availability of treatment options, like HIV and our annual visits from evolving flu viruses, COVID is likely to hover around us for a very long time. 

The well-above-average outbreaks and hospitalizations in red states, amplified in larger urban populations in such red states (like Florida and Tennessee), are clear evidence that that wide-open strategy produces the opposite result. Pandemic experts suggest that we just might have to learn to live with COVID, containing it through annual boosters and more effective treatments. Political opposition notwithstanding.

It has long been said that COVID disproportionately impacts the poor, often less educated and less informed – often more likely to have an unscientific fear of the vaccine – more than the more affluent. Those who are economically impaired are more likely to work on a factory floor, construction site or have a strong in-person job requirement where remote work is simply not an option. Unfortunately, the clear and scientifically simple GOP-supported “open everything without mandates” solutions and realities to the seeming uncontrollable COVID ebb and flow have hit a brick wall. Stubborn politization of a medical facts does not work. The paths to containment are limited, scientifically based, and not susceptible to political solutions that defy medical reality. COVID does not accept legislative mandates or executive orders to stop. It does, however, propagate when those mandates and orders defy facts. Every time!

In a recent long drive up the West Coast over the holidays, I found that almost uniformly that hotel housekeeping was generally an option (for which a specific request had to be made), hotel restaurants were often closed and formerly included breakfasts weren’t anymore. It was more than staffing shortages. No one has addressed the specific case of the impact on hotel housekeeping staff, a metaphor for the overall impact of COVID risks on those lower-level jobs, better than Hugo Martin, writing for the January 6th Los Angeles Times (“Virus protocols limit housekeepers’ access, making their jobs harder — and more disgusting”):

“The COVID-19 pandemic has added stress to most jobs, but the work of hotel housekeepers — already an occupation with high injury rates — has become increasingly difficult, with fewer workers facing short deadlines to clean rooms that are more cluttered and filthy than ever… To reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus, many of the nation’s largest hotel chains have adopted policies that make daily housekeeping optional, letting guests choose how often housekeepers enter the rooms. In most cases, that means housekeepers enter only after guests check out, leaving multiple days’ worth of trash, grime and discarded towels to deal with.

“Although demand for hotel rooms has returned to pre-pandemic levels in Southern California and other parts of the country, hotels have not replenished the housekeeping staff to the levels of 2019… In Southern California, about 70% of the housekeepers have been rehired since hotels were shut down and thousands of workers were furloughed at the onset of the pandemic, according to Unite Here, Local 11, a union that represents hospitality workers in Southern California and Arizona.

“The messes housekeepers are reporting include mounds of fast-food wrappers, piles of dirty towels, containers of half-eaten takeout food, floors sticky with spilled drinks and, occasionally, feces smeared on bathroom walls… One housekeeper shared a photo with The Times of a bed covered in hundreds of nitrous oxide capsules, manufactured for whip cream dispensers but often used by people who inhale the gas to get a quick dizzying high.

“Before the pandemic, housekeepers entered rooms on a daily basis, making it quicker and easier to clean and disinfect each day’s accumulation of clutter and grime, said Kurt Petersen, co-president of the union that represents more than 32,000 hospitality and airport workers. Under the new policies, fewer housekeepers are now required to perform roughly the same number of daily cleanings on the same short deadlines as before the pandemic, but increased messiness makes those jobs more labor-intensive, he said… ‘The pandemic has been an unmitigated, nonstop health and safety disaster for housekeepers,’ Petersen said. ‘Cleaning a room that has been left untouched for days is not only more difficult and time-consuming, but it is far less safe for guests and workers.’… The new conditions are likely to increase the already high injury rates among hotel housekeepers, he said.

“Academic studies and government labor statistics show that hotel housekeepers suffer one of the highest injury rates among service-industry workers. Many of the injuries come from lifting mattresses to make up beds and moving furniture to dust.” It’s too easy to dismiss the healthcare and work environment concerns of those at the bottom of the economic ladder, particularly those who are undocumented. But that reality not only impacts them but all of us. COVID is an equal opportunity infector constantly searching for how to spread its malignancy as far and as wide as we let it. The GOP may be its best possible friend.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the above offers clear only a small portion of proof of how ignorance combined with political arrogance can infect, kill and indefinitely postpone economic recovery.