Deep Diving

Liv R. is a pharmacy technician who entered quarantine when a family member tested positive for COVID-19. Since the pandemic started, her pharmacy implemented precautions such as plexiglass dividers to protect employees, tape to mark out social distances, and having staff open doors for customers. Despite these protections, Liv worried for the safety of her coworkers and customers when one of the people she lives with was symptomatic of, and tested for, COVID-19 While waiting for the results to return, Liv alerted her supervisors who directed her to call the pharmacy’s human resources department. After being “on hold for an hour before I finally got to talk to someone… they talked to me for like 2 minutes. I told her the situation, kind of assuming that she would be like, ‘yeah, don’t go into work until you have the test results’”. Instead, Liv was told to continue working until the test results came back. While Liv had her misgivings about this decision, her manager promised to find a position for her where she would have limited interaction with the public while she waited on test results. When Liv returned to work the next day, she was assigned to open the doors for each customer entering and leaving the pharmacy. She was deeply uncomfortable with this decision, and worried that she could be passing the virus to every customer who entered the pharmacy. Once the test results came back positive, she entered quarantine and was placed on paid sick leave. Initially, this leave was scheduled to be two weeks long, but it was extended to three weeks when she began exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19. While Liv was glad not to be working while symptomatic, this development did worry her because it meant that she could have spread the virus while at work – something she feared more than the virus itself.