As the rate of COVID-19 cases is beginning to decline and vaccines continue to become accessible to more North Carolinians, health care leaders from Orange County recently offered advice to local employers grappling with finding their way on the path to recovery.
During a virtual forum on February, the Chamber for a Greater Chapel Hill-Carrboro welcomed a series of health officials to share what employers need to know about vaccines, testing, local coronavirus data and the region’s path to recovery. The Covid Forum is the first of ten forums the Chamber is hosting this year as a part of their 2021 Critical Issues Series.
Franklin Roye, President of IndyCare Health, spoke specifically on what steps employers should be taking to fight the spread of the virus and to help facilitate their employees getting vaccinated.
Roye explained during the forum that making a shift from reactive testing to surveillance testing can significantly slow the spread of COVID-19 in a workplace. Reactive testing is when an individual is required by an employer to get tested once they begin showing symptoms or have been exposed to someone with the virus. Surveillance testing, on the other hand, is when people are required to regularly test for the virus regardless of what symptoms they may be feeling.
“There’s really a singular reason [to do this,]” Roye said, “to prevent the asymptomatic spread of the virus at your workplace. And you do that because we know up to 40% of cases are asymptomatic and individuals are generally the most contagious one or two days before they start showing symptoms.”
To support his claim of the success this strategy can bring, Roye referenced the differing testing policies between Duke and UNC last fall. While UNC only encouraged students to get tested after showing symptoms or being exposed to someone who had tested positive, Duke opened its doors with a surveillance testing policy that required students to get tested regularly.
UNC discovered 670 cases in the first two weeks of the fall semester with its reactive testing program. Duke, on the other hand, had 84 cases in the first ten weeks and about half of those were asymptomatic.
Roye acknowledged the cost of providing regular tests for employees can become expensive for many employers. He recommended those who are worried about the cost, but wish to implement surveillance testing, do so with pool testing. This method takes saliva samples from a group of employees and sends them to a lab to get tested collectively. If the sample tests positive, that group is immediately isolated and each individual within it is tested to find the person that has the virus. That person then undergoes the usual quarantine and treatment protocols while the rest of the group can come back to work.
“This is a way to do surveillance testing and significantly drop the cost of it while still getting the benefit of preventing asymptomatic spread of the workplace,” Roye said.
As for what employers can be doing to facilitate their staff getting vaccinated, Roye broke this down into two main strategies: a community-based one and an employer-based one.
“There’s a community-based strategy where your employees seek out vaccinations through community-based providers, and as an employer you can help them by helping identify those providers, giving them links to sign up and join waitlists, and things like that,” Roye said. “Another strategy that you may combine with that is employer-based, where you can partner with a vaccine provider to set up and host either an on site or off site vaccination event to get your employees vaccinated. ”
Roye also mentioned that he expects the opportunity for this employer-based strategy to become more prominent once North Carolina expands upon which types of sites and organizations are allowed to distribute the vaccine.
You can read more about the Covid Forum here, and additional information about the Chamber and their various efforts can be found on their website.
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