A few things happened over the past week.
- I had another spell of feeling dizzy and faint, which may be attributable to Long COVID. (The health care system gave me COVID about a year ago.)
- COVID-19 Resources Canada released their latest forecast. The scientific estimate is that about 1 in 34 people are currently infected (~157,097 infections/day); infections are higher than average in Québec and Ontario (pages 4 and 5).
- I took my CO2 monitor on a half-empty bus with closed windows and the readings peaked around 1350 ppm, just shy of the 1400 ppm “red” zone, well beyond the “green” zone that suggests adequate ventilation (<1000 ppm).
- Someone expressed unhappiness to me about an 80-minute unpaid commute on a crowded bus for a job that can be done from home.
Which means it’s time to get angry again about the federal government’s return-to-office mandate.
I don’t know how much plainer it can be that it’s not okay for employers to unilaterally impose the requirement that employees donate their free time and risk their health for tasks unrelated to productivity.
I also don’t know how unions think they’re helping by telling employees to continue to comply en masse while they spend years making a case through various bureaucratic channels.
This is not time that employees will ever get back, and health doesn’t always return after repeated COVID exposure either. Per this federal government return-to-office GBA+ analysis that got released via access to information (pages 12 and 26):
- recent evidence suggests that COVID-19 has been a “mass-disabling event,”
- the threat of COVID is “still present,” and
- public transportation increases risk of exposure.
These are known facts.
And my former union is… throwing a dance party tonight (Tuesday night), apparently believing the problem is that employees aren’t spending enough of their free time downtown.
I’ve registered to participate in Science Journal Club tonight, with guest speaker / whistleblower Dr. David Fisman. I’m hoping to ask if any research has been done or could be done about infectivity on rush-hour buses.
This seems like something that ought to be known, by the employees whose health and wellbeing is being sacrificed, by the unions who purport to represent them, and by the governments and employers who are eventually going to discover that mass disabling their human resources was, in fact, a bad policy.