A Quandary for New York Restaurants and Workers: What to Do About Omicron?
The New York Times
Without hard rules about employees who test positive, owners and workers are weighing safety against finances, and not always agreeing on the answer.
A week before Christmas, Skylar Peak, a busboy at ZiZi, a Mediterranean restaurant in Chelsea, learned in a text message from his manager that a co-worker had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Mr. Peak took time off to be tested, and it took five days to get a negative report. During that time, several more employees at ZiZi tested positive. The owner closed the restaurant for a week because there weren’t enough people to run it.
ZiZi has reopened, like many New York City restaurants that temporarily shuttered in December during the sudden onslaught of the Omicron variant. But the decisive moves those businesses took last month, and in earlier stages of the pandemic, have given way to something murkier — a time in which both employees and owners are deeply unsure what to do when they or co-workers test positive for the virus. Keep working and risk infecting others? Call in sick and miss out on crucial income? Close the restaurant to protect staff and customers, or take steps to safeguard them and stay open?
