Omicron taking toll on strength of Fort Collins' workforce, services

The omicron surge is taking a toll on Fort Collins' municipal workforce, particularly those who don't have the option of remote work amid Larimer County's most intense wave of COVID-19 cases yet.

During the first two weeks of January, about 10% of Fort Collins municipal employees reported testing positive for COVID-19, experiencing COVID-like symptoms and awaiting a test result, or being exposed to someone who’d tested positive. That total included 158 employees Jan. 10-16 and 72 employees Jan. 2-8, Fort Collins Human Resources Director Karen Burke said. For comparison’s sake, 32 city employees reported COVID-19 positivity, symptoms or exposure during the week of Nov. 7-13, before the omicron wave.

The city employs 2,223 people across all classifications, making it one of the largest employers in the community.

“It’s definitely a spike for us,” said Burke, who added that the city’s had to get creative to avoid service interruptions. “We haven't seen service issues, but we've needed to be very proactive with how we handle those essential services.”

She said some of Fort Collins’ most impacted departments have been Transfort, Streets, Police Services, Utilities and Operation Services. Those are the departments where many employees have to do their work in-person.

This wave is different from the delta wave in two important ways, Burke said.

“With delta, we didn't see nearly as many (positive cases), but when we did see positives they were out for longer and they were much sicker,” she said.

Fort Collins’ trash haulers are also experiencing an increase in COVID-19 cases among employees, according to spokespeople from Republic Services (formerly Gallegos Sanitation) and Waste Management, who didn’t share exact numbers. Waste Management's statement referenced some isolated service disruptions, and Republic is experiencing an active outbreak with five cases among staff, according to the Larimer County health department. (The other main hauler in Fort Collins, Ram Waste Systems, didn’t return a call seeking information.)

More: Another 17 COVID-19 outbreaks reported in Larimer County amid omicron surge

Fort Collins Utilities is dealing with an active, 18-case outbreak among staff that triggered a closure of the customer service counter until at least Jan. 28. An outbreak at Fort Collins Police Services, its third since the pandemic started, has tallied 10 positive cases.

That’s not to mention spikes in cases among staff of schools, hospitals, nursing homes and other essential service providers throughout Larimer County. Just as alpha and delta did before it, the ultra-contagious omicron variant is putting a strain on people who provide essential services in the community and can’t do that work remotely.

The surge has taxed city services at times. A wave of cases among Fort Collins snowplow drivers slowed the city’s response to snowfall during the first week of January. And this week, Fort Collins’ Mulberry Pool rolled out restricted daytime hours due to a staffing shortage driven by COVID-19 and lingering hiring and retention troubles in the city’s Recreation Department.

“If we get one person with COVID, we don't have the bench to backfill and call in a sub,” Burke said. “So we needed to take a more proactive approach in reducing the hours so that we could keep staff healthy and make sure we could have some consistency for our community.”

In cases like the Mulberry Pool staffing shortage, the surge is exacerbating the prolonged challenge of worker retention. Interim Recreation Director Aaron Harris told the Coloradoan earlier this week that the city's aquatics team has been "trying desperately to hire and train people for ... key positions for the past six months, but there have not been enough qualified applicants available for hire."

The recreation department has been dealing with staff shortages for several years for front desk positions, facilities, sports, aquatics and child care. Those were many of the positions that faced furloughs back in 2020, when many recreation facilities temporarily shut their doors.

The problem is indicative of a larger trend: Fort Collins, like other employers, hasn’t seen full return of the workforce following pandemic-related closures and a wave of resignations and early retirements. The city government's workforce turnover was 10% in 2021, the same as in 2020. Annual turnover was about 8% in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

"We did experience more retirements during the pandemic, and people that we weren't expecting to retire — younger than the traditional retirement age traditionally," Burke said. "We've seen some people that have opted out of work and have said, 'I'm going to make a change in my life.' ... For a while, there was the added stimulus with unemployment. And I think people are prioritizing their safety."

The city has tried to reduce service impacts of the pandemic by isolating teams of employees when possible to prevent larger ripple effects of a positive test or exposure, Burke said.

Employees are required to report symptoms every day, and those who test positive have to isolate for at least five days. They can return to work after that if their symptoms are improving, they have no fever without fever-reducing medications and follow mask-wearing and social distancing policies. The city adheres to health department policy for quarantine of people who've been exposed to COVID-19.

All city employees have access to sick days in addition to the state-provided 80 hours of emergency sick leave for COVID-19 symptoms, exposure and related issues. The city also created a donation bank for employees to donate unused sick time, Burke said. Risk management staff are considering supplying employees with higher-quality masks, such as N95s or KN95s, which offer more protection against infection compared with cloth and surgical masks.

More: CSU experts explain mask recommendations, which masks offer highest protection

City employees aren't required to be vaccinated.

City leaders are hopeful that cases will peak next week in Larimer County and then start to decline, Burke said. Modeling from the Colorado School of Public Health projects cases in Colorado will peak the week of Jan. 24.

Larimer County’s case rate has shown signs of a plateauing since Jan. 10, with the 7-day case rate consistently hovering between 1,400 and 1,500 positive tests per 100,000 people. That means that about 1.5 in 100 people have tested positive in a 7-day period.

However, it’s taken longer to get test results back since the omicron surge arrived because of the increase in testing demand. As of Jan. 13, about 54% of tests had a turnaround time of four days or more, and another 28% took three days. The lag time, plus increased use of at-home rapid tests, can make it difficult to discern what’s going on with the case rate day to day.

If cases have plateaued, they’ve plateaued at the highest level Larimer County has seen since the start of the pandemic. The case rate is more than six times higher now than it was in mid-December.

The test positivity rate sat at 28.5% on Friday, down from the Jan. 15 high of 33% but still an indicator that more people in the community are infected than test results alone would suggest.

More: Need a COVID test? Here's where to go in Larimer County and how to get free rapid tests

It’s unclear how close we are to reaching endemic status, where COVID-19 cases reach a more stable level that doesn’t cause disruptions in the community. That unfortunate reality has created a sense of fatigue among city staff that most people can probably relate to, Burke said.

“I think there is a weariness because the pandemic has gone on so long, and our work isn't the same,” she said.

The city’s trying to support staff through additional check-ins with supervisors and bringing in guest speakers to talk about workload management and resilience. City leaders gave a one-time gratitude payment to staff, with amounts ranging between $100 and $1,500 after taxes. The amount depended on whether the employee was hourly or salaried and how much work they carried out between spring 2020 and spring 2021.

City employees will also be eligible for raises again in 2022 after pandemic-related uncertainty led to a pay freeze during 2021.

The city’s testing a hybrid return to work approach that gives employees flexibility to work in person or remotely, if that’s possible for their position. The ongoing “future of work” project is assessing the return to work with equity in mind, understanding that the return to on-site work won’t look the same for everybody.

Jacy Marmaduke covers government accountability for the Coloradoan. Follow her on Twitter @jacymarmaduke. Support her work and that of other Coloradoan journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Fort Collins sees dramatic uptick in COVID-19 among municipal staff