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Vancouver hairdresser Missy Clarkson has mixed feelings about heading back to work next week.
“I really miss my clients and it will be really nice to see them,” she said. “But I am feeling nervous, for sure.”
As provinces begin re-opening their economies, Canadians who’ve been sheltering at home for weeks now face the prospect of heading back to work. And they may arrive to find their workplaces looking much differently.
“It’s going to be a very different feeling in the salon,” Clarkson says, listing restrictions that will include limiting the number of customers, adding more space between chairs and sinks, and staff members wearing masks and possibly even face shields. “We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. It’s our new normal.”
In addition to wearing masks and keeping their distance, some companies are introducing new screening measures.
“Every day we’re going to ask them: has anything in your condition changed, from a health perspective?” said Frank Voss, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.
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The automaker will re-open its plants in southwestern Ontario on Monday for the first time since mid-March.
When employees arrive,
they’ll be asked about any symptoms and scanned by a thermal imaging camera. Anyone with a temperature above 37.2 C will be flagged. Plexiglass barriers have also been installed separating some production lines and between chairs in the cafeteria.
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Some companies are even requiring their employees to download a smartphone app. Vancouver’s Daniel Leung is the founder and CEO of LivNao, a tech firm that’s developed a contact tracing app that tracks an employee’s location while at work.
Using a phone’s GPS and Bluetooth signals, it can determine whether employees have had contact with a co-worker who tested positive for COVID-19. The app can also tell if workers are violating social distancing rules by gathering in close proximity or in large numbers.
“Let’s say, for example, best practices are that you’re only allowed to have one person in a truck at a time on a construction site and we see that there are two people in the truck. We might send a notification to the two users and just remind them that to be safe, there should only be one person at a time in a truck,” Leung explained.
“It’s important to note that all of this remains anonymous. It’s not a tool for employers or even the government to track individual people. It’s a tool to keep people safe and to help people re-activate the workforce.”
But the growing number of contact tracing smartphone apps, deployed by both private companies and governments in more than 25 countries in response to COVID-19, is sparking a global debate over privacy.
Contact tracing has traditionally been done by manually calling a sick person’s contacts one-by-one. But as Canadians begin to emerge from isolation and start having contact with more people, that workload could grow exponentially.
“It’s going to require many, many, many people to be able to follow-up with all of those positive tests,” said Dr. Michael Gardam, chief of staff at Humber River Hospital. “And that’s a part where I think we’re particularly vulnerable, because no public health unit has the resources to do that right now.”
A contact tracing app automates that process, by retracing the movements of COVID-19 patients and automatically alerting other smartphone users who may have had contact.
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But governments in Canada have been reluctant to adopt the technology, citing privacy concerns. Most of the apps currently on offer require access to a smartphone’s GPS location, allowing the government to track a person’s movements.
“If you knew that, as of tomorrow, the government has a trace on everywhere I’ve been and all the people I’ve come in contact with, you may not want to live in a country like that,” said Richard Janda, a professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University.
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