Contact Tracing: a Short Story
Sep. 7, 2020
What happens when an invisible threat infiltrates your office…
The Time That Margaux Got Sick
2 minute read
Margaux’s alarm goes off, and she drags her feet out of bed. Around 9 a.m, Margaux enters the office building and rides the elevator with a couple of people she’s sure she’s never seen. She says hi people in the kitchen as she’s filling up her bottle, and then heads on over to her desk. Her office spans three floors, but luckily her team is only 12 people, so she doesn’t have to remember too many names. She has lunch with some people from the office, but she doesn’t have time to enjoy the tofu quinoa salad too much because she has three back to back meetings, which will most likely only result in three new paper airplanes, a couple of games of tic-tac-toe, and two additional meetings scheduled for later on in the week. By 4 p.m she’s quite tired, physically, and emotionally because she met with many people but feels happy with the work she did. Around dinner time, she begins to feel a little feverish, but she doesn’t think too much of it. She did a lot today and decides to turn in early. At 2 am, she wakes up coughing, and no longer feels as good as she did the day before. Is this an isolated instance intended to irritate her in the middle of the night or is this COVID-19? The next day, she wakes up feeling terrible. This isn’t good. Margaux messages her workplace manager, Helen, to let her know she thinks she might have COVID-19…
As a workplace manager, it’s Helen’s job to maintain the well-being and health in the office. She would think that people would be more careful these days but, as fate would have it, they just live their lives as though life is all dandy. Then again, she can’t really fault them. She’s followed the seven tips for workplace managers and feel quite confident that she can be there for her people when they need it most. Hopefully, they know to come to her if they have something serious or concerning going on…
This morning, however, she receives a worrying message from Margaux in finance. She said she felt fine yesterday but that she started coughing a lot during the night and is now displaying symptoms of COVID-19. Helen checks all of Margaux’s bookings for the last week and sees where she was sitting and with whom she met. Luckily she works in a small team and only had five meetings, but the office is an open plan. Imagine if she were a manager or C-level employee. The data and the list of meetings would be endless…
She does her best to maintain adequate indoor ventilation. However, you never know. Using Spaceti Analytics, she collects all the data and begins contacting all the people she came in contact with. She wishes that your company had a larger budget so that she could at least get the people in Margaux’s immediate bubble tested, but for now, at least they must all quarantine. Situations like these can be handled, but it makes her wonder how many people are asymptomatic and coming to work. Maybe she will talk to her boss and ask if they could invest in some temperature check system.
