Apple ordering frequent COVID testing for all corporate, retail employees
Apple will reportedly begin requiring regular coronavirus testing for both vaccinated and unvaccinated employees working at its offices or brick-and-mortar stores.
Credit: Apple
According to The Verge reporter Zoe Schiffer, the new policy will apply to both corporate and retail staffers. Vaccinated employees will need to get "infrequent tests," while those who are unvaccinated will be subject to more regular testing. It'll take effect in October.
The move follows an Apple ramp-up in Covid-19 testing availability that kicked off in August. Although the company began sending more at-home testing kits to employees and encouraged their use, it did not require staffers to test themselves.
In contrast with other technology companies, Apple has yet to implement any sort of vaccine mandate, citing employee privacy. Earlier in September, the company began collecting voluntary information on the vaccination status of its employees, however.
Apple initially planned to bring workers back to the office at least a few days a week by September, but has delayed that timeline twice. Currently, a return to in-office work has been postponed until January 2022 at the earliest.
Employees at Apple have pushed back against the in-office work requirement, penning letters to Apple executives and using internal channels to advocate for more flexible work arrangements. Apple executives, for their part, are sticking with their plan to have staffers return to offices.
Read on AppleInsider
Credit: Apple
According to The Verge reporter Zoe Schiffer, the new policy will apply to both corporate and retail staffers. Vaccinated employees will need to get "infrequent tests," while those who are unvaccinated will be subject to more regular testing. It'll take effect in October.
The move follows an Apple ramp-up in Covid-19 testing availability that kicked off in August. Although the company began sending more at-home testing kits to employees and encouraged their use, it did not require staffers to test themselves.
In contrast with other technology companies, Apple has yet to implement any sort of vaccine mandate, citing employee privacy. Earlier in September, the company began collecting voluntary information on the vaccination status of its employees, however.
Apple initially planned to bring workers back to the office at least a few days a week by September, but has delayed that timeline twice. Currently, a return to in-office work has been postponed until January 2022 at the earliest.
Employees at Apple have pushed back against the in-office work requirement, penning letters to Apple executives and using internal channels to advocate for more flexible work arrangements. Apple executives, for their part, are sticking with their plan to have staffers return to offices.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Oh, that's the kind of immunity that 90+% of hospitalized Covid patients have, correct?
"That's the immunity that comes from having the antibodies as a result of having contracted the virus and recovered."
Ahhh.. So that's what those 100,000ish souls are doing in the hospital. They're getting 'Active immunity' so they won't get it again. Assuming they don't die in the process or develop 'long Covid' symptoms. Makes purrrfect sense.
When and how will this all be wound back, and most importantly, how do we make sure they are? Because if that isn’t actively planned for and governments held to account to make sure they are, liberty will never be given back.
But exactly, they could easily test in situations where it would be deemed necessary. That's always been an option, for everyone.
No, those would be the claimed (w/o evidence, as far as I've been able to tell) people who are unvaxxed and haven't yet had Covid. While people who have had Covid already can contract it again, the vaxxed are *much* more likely to do so, and it seems are more likely to spread it than those who have had Covid already (or even those who haven't and are unvaxxed).
"SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021. The increased risk was significant (P0.001) for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination (from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold (95% CI, 4.85 to 7.33) increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold (95% CI, 5.51 to 9.21) increased risk for symptomatic disease. SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected."
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1.full.pdf
Shedding of Infectious SARS-CoV-2 Despite Vaccination | medRxiv
Actually, it's even better than that. It includes T-cells and a much broader ability to detect variants, instead of just last-year's virus.
The downside, is of course, that you'd have to get and recover from Covid. For most healthy, young people, that isn't *usually* that big of a deal. So, there is a risk-calculation here. The problem is that as more data keeps coming in, one side of that calculation is looking more and more scary.
We'll just all have to hope and pray this guy*** isn't right: https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/post/the-last-post
Because if he is, Apple might have a bunch of job openings to fill over the next couple of years (as well as a lot of other companies).
(*** btw, you might want to have a peek at his bio before responding to this with the usual 'conspiracy theory' tripe.)
I'll show mine...
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-protection.html
Needless to state, I don't believe you source. What was the tell?
That's a pretty unbelievable multiple...
I haven't seen that 27x figure, but if you look at my earlier post, you'll see an ~13x figure. That isn't really unexpected either, and is common sense when you think about it a bit. The mRNA is designed to instruct your body to produce one small aspect of the original variant of the virus. Your immune system, when exposed to the real virus, is very likely to 'map' it much better. The vaccine primarily produces antibodies, where as natural immunity involves a T-Cells and another similar sounding one I can't remember right now. As expected, this is a much more robust immunity.
The other problem is that we're now dealing with the Delta variant (mainly) which wasn't the target of the vaccines. It seems somewhat effective, but much less than it was for the original version. We'll be facing Lambda, Mu, and others in the future, which it might do little to nothing for, whereas the natural immunity is much more likely to be effective against. And, there is the possibility of ADE (antibody dependent enhancement) which they hopefully have thwarted, or we'll have a lot more people lost, but vaxxed this time.
Also, here is what Dr Robert Malone (inventor of the the mRNA vaccination technology) had to say a little while back at a panel discussion on mass vaccination, herd immunity, and escape mutants, etc.:
https://globalcovidsummit.org/news/san-juan-panel-undertreatment-cited-as-a-cause-for-hospitalizations-long-haul-covid (43m30s in)
First of all, your system develops immunity when you get sick. So, in that sense, I suppose you're a bit correct in that we don't have pre-existing natural immunity to this particular virus variation. However, there is some data that due to past corona virus exposure, the immune systems of some people are able to better mount a defense against this one and it's variants. How do you think we got through past SARS (and other) viruses before we had vaccines?
And, that isn't how it works. The mRNA instructs your cells to produce the spike protein of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus. Your body responds by producing antibodies against that spike protein. Those proteins aren't necessarily harmless, and there is some evidence that they are in fact the cause of some of the 'long-covid' symptoms.
Yes, there is absolutely a risk to going unvaccinated. Fortunately, if you're not really old or have other major health issues, it is relatively low. The debate isn't over whether the vaccines are effective (though that is decreasing with each variant, again, as one would expect), it is over the potential side effects and whether individuals should be allowed to run that risk-calculation and decide for themselves. Here, you can calculate your odds: My Covid Odds
If there was strong social benefit to being vaccinated, I'd *personally* have an issue with it, as I have some concerting autoimmune conditions that it seems to dramatically inflate in some people, but I'd be supportive of it on the whole. The problem, as Dr Malone lays out above, is that the social benefit is next to nothing, if not negative (I'd say almost certainly... this is how evolution works). About the only argument for social benefit I've heard that holds water, is by reducing symptoms (as far as that works, again the variants might be a different story... then it is a game of whack-a-mole between evolution and big-pharma) we might keep the ICU levels lower. That's kind of it, though (and the big problem in ICUs is staffing, not beds/equipment, on the whole).