FDA Approves Breathalyzer Covid Test
Happy Monday, dear readers! Your humble blogger trusts that the weekend was peaceful and meaningful for his beloved readers.
If you are observing Passover, may your bread-free life pass painfully until the end of the festival. If you are observing Easter, I hope you find all the eggs you hid and that you will not judge your humble blogger for raiding the clearance aisle for all the Easter candy the stores failed to off-load. I’m just buying it for … um… the kids! Yeah, that’s the ticket: those Cadbury eggs are just for the kids and totally not for your humble blogger to eat in reckless abandon for his waistline.
Anywho, aside from observing holidays, let’s talk COVID and technology. More specifically, the FDA has approved a breathalyzer test for COVID19, which reportedly produces results in 3 minutes with a 91% accuracy rate.
As many practitioners did, your humble blogger looked ahead and anticipated the issues that will go to trial over COVID19 and the various vaccine rules. Is an employee engaged in “serious and willful” misconduct by refusing to vaccinate? If an employer’s vaccine mandate is the only reason an injured worker is not being returned to modified duty, is the injured worker still entitled to TTD? Is an employer’s different treatment of unvaccinated employees sufficient to give rise to psyche and stress claims?
Well, perhaps this can be the answer. Instead of requiring proof of current vaccination status, perhaps an at-work screening for COVID19 positivity is a better solution. After all, it is now pretty solidly established that the vaccinated can both catch and transmit the disease, as we’ve seen in some recent examples, so wouldn’t it be sounder policy to breath-test all employees as they come to work to ensure no one is bringing COVID19 to work?
This is a device and method worth watching, as it may offer a relatively pain-free solution to the animated (and sometimes violent) debate we’ve seen played out nationally and internationally about the balance of rights and responsibilities in public.
What do you think, dear readers?