Escambia County government reports eight more employees have tested positive – new total 43, up 23% from yesterday. Another 12 are awaiting test results – new total 90, up 15%.
Corrections has 6 more positives; EMS one more; and the first one in Dispatch/911 communications – the Public Safety building definitely has a problem. See how many are now awaiting test results.
Read report.
How convenient that they didn’t have the breakdown of staff numbers within the Public Safety division handy.
SMH.
A driver for ECCT/ITL paratransit is also positive. I believe they contract with the County? I’m not 100% on that particular relationship, but I wonder if any contract workers in general who are testing positive appear in these numbers.
While County and Florida State employees are not covered under federal OSHA, contract workers are private labor and thus they are protected. If I’ve added up all the PO’s properly, it looks like the County has paid out over 2M to Blue Arbor alone since the beginning of last October:
https://myescambia.com/open-government/check-register
Although Blue Arbor also provides what seems to me a shocking amount of goods to Escambia County, there are a whole lot of private contract workers rolled up in that 2 million. And of course Blue Arbor isn’t the only company providing contract labor to the County.
In addition, according to a Facebook post made by Drew Chandler, the County put out an RFP for more custodial services last Friday. (This is after nobody returned his offer for *gratis* assistance with specialty disinfection training. At least it was a step in the right direction from the quarter M dropped on a covid awareness campaign that came 3 months too late–I believe that might have been sole sourced. Perhaps Doug considered it “emergent.”)
OSHA has adopted CDC guidelines for their own during the pandemic, so the County had better rev up and start complying with them, or Alison Rogers could be spending a bunch more taxpayer money on outside counsel to mediate away justifiable lawsuits.