As shocking as this may seem, we’ve actually seen it happen multiple times to our clients in the past year. Before you shake your head (or fist), consider that understaffed health departments are racing against the clock to notify the public within 72 hours of a measles exposure, because that’s the window in which exposed people who are unvaccinated can get a dose of MMR to slash their chances of getting the disease.
It can seem unfair and ridiculous. In a perfect world, it would be easy to take two minutes to call a business to give them a heads up before going public. But in reality, we’ve seen our clients get this call as few as 30 minutes before the health department goes public, and, as in this case, even after. It’s not malicious — it’s usually a sign of an overwhelmed team working fast to contain an outbreak and dealing with a disease that is actually new to them. So many health practitioners have not actually seen measles.
Local news often picks these stories up, and it can be scary to see your business in the news without any communication from public health. But there’s a silver lining here, too.
Across the country, we are seeing very little reaction from the public after a business is named as an exposure site: no revenue loss, no increase in guest complaints or concerned phone calls, and no operational disruption.
We’re also not seeing health departments making challenging requests. Gone are the days of unvaccinated employees needing to quarantine for 21 days, or managers needing to provide proof of vaccination for everyone on their schedule. Instead, most health departments are simply asking for contact info for people who worked during the exposure window (usually 3-5 hours at most) so that they can call them to inform them of what symptoms to look out for, and tell them when to seek medical attention.
If it happens to you, the most important step is to not panic. Share high quality info with your team, get all the information you can from the health department once you’re in contact with them, and take a deep breath. The risk is low for your employees and your guests. And don’t forget you can always pull our Measles Exposure Action Plan in the ZHH app, or chat from 6am to midnight Eastern for live support and resources from a clinical pro who can help you navigate this.
Source: ZHH
We’ll leave you with something a bit lighter heading into the weekend: a corporate retreat from hell, complete with so many employee health issues we lost count, including E. coli, sand fleas, heat exhaustion, and…porcupines?