As the Delta variant fuels surges in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, employees and employers are increasingly at odds over back-to-work requirements and conditions. As fall arrives, schools and colleges have been increasingly at the center of these battles, with students and parents seeking in-person education while staff and faculty seek to minimize their personal vulnerability to COVID and the danger of bringing it home to vulnerable family members — those under 12 and those with autoimmune diseases. Administrators, like employers and managers in other fields, struggle with the balance.
There is a factor in this balancing act, however, which remains largely unspoken, even invisible: the personal situation of those making the decision. Do those who decide live the same plan they create for others? Do they have vulnerable people at home? Do they work in close proximity to numerous other people, or are they relatively isolated in offices, far from those who might carry the disease? Do they need to take mass transit to work, or are they able to drive in alone, protected against the spread of COVID that is inevitable when many people — some vaccinated, some not — are crowded together?
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