You literally have no idea what you are talking about. At all. Please Google and understand what “animal reservoir” even means before commenting again.

? Of course you can vaccinate against a coronavirus. If enough people got vaccinated, we could achieve herd immunity, which would — radically — slow down the spread of the virus, and it variants, to both humans and animals.

You can’t vaccinate against a coronavirus because it has animal reservoirs. Unless you simultaneously vaccinate all the animals in the world. Good luck.

Thanks for acknowledging IT workers; I’m one myself. It reminds me of the millennium, when so many computer-related bad things were predicted. When almost none of that materialized, many people said, see, we made too much of that, it was no big deal. What they didn’t see were the tens of thousands of hours that IT professionals worked to make sure the bad stuff didn’t happen. I know in my shop we started working on the issues two years before the cutover. So yup, thanks to all the IT staff that keeps us able to WFH!

One big advantage to WFH is that it requires butt-in-seat managers, who measure productivity by whether people look busy, to learn better management skills. I’d want continued WFH if it made the difference between being treated like an adult professional rather than a kid in study hall. But those skills could be brought back to the office if managers and their employers are willing to make a point of it.

I agree with just about everything you said. I do believe that companies should mandate vaccinations. Unfortunately, in some jurisdictions, they have to defy mandates from political so-called leaders banning vaccine and masking mandates.

No one is trying to “put [you] in a facility to keep [you] away.” Paranoid much? However, the fact is that the unvaccinated are much more likely to contract COVID-19, much more likely to remain infectious for a longer period of time, much more likely to get seriously ill, require hospitalization and ventilation and much more likely to die. If someone is resisting the common-sense public health measure of vaccination, they may also be ignoring other such measures, such as masking, social distancing, hand-washing, testing, quarantining, etc. All of these factors make the unvaccinated much more likely to spread COVID-19, and — as long as it continues to rapidly spread — the more variants will arise, prolonging the pandemic and increasing the number of illnesses and deaths, many of them preventable.

OMG this is crazy. I had covid last Feb. I have had a T Detect test done and have more immunity than triple vaxxxxxxed and boosted people. But you would probably have me put in a facility to keep me away. Everyone I know vaxxed has recently had Omicron. I am being so careful that I have not had even a COLD since I had covid.

Stop saying that the unvaxxed are the problem when the vaxxed are getting and spreading it – often with little or no symptoms. I have heard people at work say they have a cold and are not testing because they are vaxxxxxed and cannot get it or pass it on. THEY are the problem.

“The main question should be how can an adequate program be developed that takes care of the issues and continues the perks of WFH?”

That question presupposes that WFH is the ideal. I disagree entirely. The ideal, it seems to me, is to accept that WFH and butts-in-seats are two ends of a spectrum, and that, as with so many things in the human condition, people and organizations fall somewhere along that spectrum. Organizations should be striving to create a culture that accepts a broad range on that spectrum (the culture of the organization itself must be considered, obviously, so few will be able to embrace the full range). I, for example, am FAR happier with an office away from my home–I compartmentalize pretty strongly, and I enjoy having physical separation between various aspects of my life. The company I work for, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to let people in certain roles work from home; saves on overhead.

As for making workplaces safer, the best thing we can do is for each company to require vaccinations. It’s basic occupational health. There are three ways to mitigate a risk: engineering controls, administrative controls, and PPE. Masks are PPE, the least effective mitigation measure (masks without training don’t count as PPE). Social distancing is an administrative control, akin to telling a worker in a loud environment they can only work there for one hour, then need a half-hour break. They’re still exposed to the hazard, we’re just trying to minimize the damage. Engineering controls are things like building a sound-proof room for the person to work in–it eliminates the hazard. Vaccination and herd immunity are on that level. (I am leaving aside “do something that doesn’t have that hazard” since that is not an option in a pandemic.) We have established, at least in the USA, that OSHA doesn’t have the authority to mandate vaccinations; however, we’ve also established that companies are allowed to be more strict in their safety protocols than the law requires. At this point, it’s a matter of personal responsibility, not government mandate.