In case you haven't noticed...people are kind of panicking about the Coronavirus.
This pandemic has officially hit the entire world, and though it has a low mortality rate, is not fully understood yet. As such, people are taking extra precautions.
u/gab-bee asked:
How is Coronavirus impacting your job at the moment?
Here were some of those answers.
More Time Away
I work in a hospital. An email went out today telling us to involve the minimum number of staff for any patient on droplet/airborne precautions— no students, scribes, etc— to conserve mask supplies. They usually turn a blind eye to staff taking supplies home but they're threatening disciplinary action now for anyone who takes masks/sanitizer. Someone stole the sanitizer off the secretary's desk today.
We're encouraged to have a low threshold for calling in and use telemedicine when appropriate instead of coming to a doctor's office. They'll advance us 2 weeks of PTO if we don't have any. Which is all well and good, but they're not giving extra to us, just advancing it, and I'd much rather use PTO for vacation so it's kind of a bummer since i'll almost definitely get it.
Life Completely Changed
I was living in Shanghai with a great job and a great apartment. I visited a friend for a last minute vacation in Taiwan when the virus hit China really bad. My job shut down and I was told not to come back to the country. They stopped paying me salary and housing stipend (even though it's illegal) and I've been stuck in Taiwan ever since trying to start a new life. I essentially lost all my stuff as I couldn't pay for the apartment anymore. Need to resort to teaching English (temporarily?) to survive here. No end in sight and not sure what my future holds. It's a scary time and has been a rough month.
The End Of An Era
I work in the hotel industry. My hotel has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue between cancellations of leisure travel and business travel. We've seen cancellations all the way through June/July...we were tracking for a huge Q1 but now everything is up in the air. We're having to shuffle labor so some of our hourly staff is losing shifts since we don't have the occupancy in the building to justify having the full staff in house.
It's a really scary time in my industry. All of the revenue managers in the city are having a collective panic attack.
Ah, Xenophobia
I went on holiday to Asia and my boss told me not to come to work for three weeks. Even though financially I'm screwed these three weeks have been bloody marvellous.
No More Personal Items
I work for Starbucks. We are no longer making drinks in personal cups and we have a timer set for every thirty minutes to tell everyone to wash their hands.
Empty Roads
I'm a nanny in Seattle. Both parents are working from home so the house has been chaos. I can't take the little one to all the usual activities so he's getting cabin fever.
Bright side, my hour commute has been reduced to 35 minutes because everyone else is working from home and there's no traffic.
Not Actually Helpful
Honestly all we have is some more signs on the wall telling people to handwash, and a few sanitising stations set up by doorways.
The only other place I've noticed its effect in my town is the local Bulk Barn isn't letting people bring their own containers, which is one of the biggest points of shopping there. Seems a bit useless as well when every customer has to use the same metal scoop to fill up their product bags anyway.
Such A Nice Lady!
I work retail. We're out of paper towels, wet wipes, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and water. We're also quickly running out of baby food, canned goods, cereals, and bleach.
I've also had some old boomer tell me she hopes I catch Coronavirus and die because I couldn't magically pull a bottle of Germex out of my @$$ for her to buy.
Stay Put
We now have a daily janitorial team whose #1 priority is disinfecting door handles, water fountains, keyboards, screens. Basically anything people touch a lot. Also if you have it or a family member has it but you don't have the sick time for it then sick time will be given to you. Also all travel and large gatherings are canceled through the end of the month. The last one is kinda disappointing because there were events planned but health safety is definitely more important.
Safety First
I work as a restaurant server in two different casinos. We get a lot of traffic from states with confirmed outbreaks but since it's a kitchen/food environment it's basically just "make sure you're washing your hands and following the safety guidelines you should be following everyday anyways, and please don't come in sick, which you shouldn't do anyways"