Federal employees now account for more than 100,000 cases of coronavirus, with about 3% of workers in civilian and military agencies testing positive. This is just under three times the amount that had the virus in mid-July. Federal employees had been working from home where possible during the spring and start of summer, but as stay at home orders were lifted, more of them began to be recalled to the office.
While many employees had been resistant to coming back to the office, in October, the Trump administration put together guidelines for a safe return to work. These guidelines were developed with input from the private sector as well. This plan has also been met with resistance and has resulted in different agencies’ inspectors general launching investigations into the plans.
The agencies that have the most cases are somewhat expected, with the Department of Defense, the US Postal Service, and the Department of Veterans Affairs leading the way.
Obviously these are some of the biggest agencies in the government, but they also have higher chances of exposure than if they worked in more of a strictly office-type environment, like at the Internal Revenue Service.
At the Post Office, where 16,000 have tested positive, it means that about two and a half percent of the workforce has been infected with COVID, but in smaller agencies, like the Bureau of Prisons, there have been fewer infections (2,500+) but it represents a much larger portion of the workforce (around seven percent).
This makes it much more difficult for federal prisons to run business as usual, particularly when the federal inmate population has had double the share of infections. The 14% who have tested positive represent almost 20,000 federal inmates.
At Extract, one of the nice features about our automated redaction and indexing software is that it can be used in a remote environment. Your data and documents still don’t ever have to leave your firewall, but employees can run new batches through the software and verify information from home.
Flexibility has become more important than ever during the pandemic, so we’re making sure that we’re doing our part to keep the government entities using our product running smoothly. If data and document automation is something that would help your organization, please reach out and we’d be happy to share more information.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.