CA Extends COVID Sick Pay Amid Omicron Surge: What To Know

CALIFORNIA — In response to the unrelenting omicron surge, COVID-19 sick pay was renewed in the Golden State, granting workers as much as two weeks paid time off, officials announced this week.

The legislature reached a deal Tuesday to extend supplemental paid sick leave for California's workers through Sept. 30, Gov. Gavin Newsom, along with Senate pro Tempore Toni G. Atkins and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon announced.

On Jan. 10, Newsom previewed a $2.7 billion coronavirus response package, which called for new legislation to reinstate COVID-19 paid sick leave policies.

Under the new agreement, the state Legislature will act on Newsom’s emergency budget request for COVID-19-related programs months before the regular budget is negotiated this summer.

The new leave only covers employers with 26 or more workers, and the state will provide tax credits to businesses and companies to offset associated costs.

"By extending sick leave to frontline workers with COVID and providing support for California businesses, we can help protect the health of our workforce while also ensuring that businesses and our economy are able to thrive. We will continue to work to address additional needs of small businesses through the budget – they are the backbone of our communities and continue to be impacted by COVID-19," a joint statement read.

SEE MORE: CA Paid Sick Leave For Workers And Businesses: 3 Things To Know

The renewed policy comes as the omicron surge continues to wreak havoc on the state's workforce, creating labor shortages for the health care system, schools and public transit.

The number of Californians who were not working in the last month due to a COVID-19 infection spiked by 320 percent, according to a California Budget and Policy Center analysis of census data.

Millions of workers in California whose jobs don't provide paid sick days were forced to choose between their health and their paycheck as the omicron variant of COVID-19 continued to rake California this winter.

Many employers created strong sick leave policies at the beginning of the pandemic, but much of were scaled back following the rollout of the vaccines. But the omicron variant has managed to drive up breakthrough cases in the vaccinated, creating a crisis for California's workforce.

"No worker should be forced to choose between earning a paycheck or going to work sick," the California Labor Federation tweeted earlier this month.

Newsom's newly proposed pandemic funding would also be allocated to rev up testing capacity, accelerate vaccination and booster efforts, support frontline workers, strengthen the health care system and battle misinformation.

The proposal would allocate $1.2 billion to bolster testing capacity by expanding hours at state testing sites, distributing COVID-19 antigen tests to local health departments and supporting the state's testing facilities. $583 million would go toward getting more Californians tested for COVID-19, among other things, while $614 million would be used to support healthcare workers and health care systems.

Earlier this month, health authorities around the U.S. and the Golden State took the extraordinary step of allowing nurses and other workers infected with the coronavirus to stay on the job if they have mild symptoms or none at all.

READ MORE: Free N95 Masks Available At CA CVS, Costco And Walgreens Soon

Health care workers who were infected and continued to work were advised to wear N95 masks and to interact mainly with COVID-19-positive patients, according to the new guidance.

Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state's health secretary, said the new guidelines should not be viewed as a mandate and will hopefully expire on Feb. 1.

This is in no way a requirement," Ghaly told KCRA in a conference call. "Nobody at the state is requiring health care workers to come back who are infected or quarantined. It really is meant to give added flexibility to systems as we enter in or continue in a period of significant demand."

California's omicron surge was beginning to show signs of leveling off this week as the rate of COVID-19 infection dipped slightly. But hospitalizations, which tend to lag behind infections, remain astonishingly high.Cases were expected to drop in California in the coming weeks, according to researchers at Washington State University.

The state's positivity rate was 20.4 percent on Monday, down slightly from 21.2 percent last week.

"I think it's important to keep in mind though that, while thankfully we think the peak may have happened, we are still at higher levels of transmission than we have ever seen," said Dr. Erica Pan, California state epidemiologist, according to CapRadio.

SEE ALSO: CA Omicron Infections Dip As Hospitalizations Remain High

This article originally appeared on the Los Angeles Patch