Covid, Part 2 (Federal Version)

August 17, 2022 11:43 AM

I got an artist in residence, yay. But I don't know about the vaccination rules, boo.

I'm vaccinated times 4, or two shots and two boosters, if you prefer.

I fought (politely) to get a house with one roommate instead of two, 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (due to some medical issues).

It occurred to me I ought to ask about vaccinations. It's the National Park Program.

My contact said, "I would rather rather talk on the phone because it is easier for me to communicate these sensitive and important issues." (We've been e-mailing a lot.)

Anyway, I read this as: so you won't have to put it in writing.

But, I always like mefite opinions, or more accurately, information. I started to google it and I go a million places. I believe someone here must know:

Do the Feds require a vaccination?

This is an intern, and as I mention we we will be sharing a house.

G/d I just dodged a covid bullet two days ago.

Sorry for the hurry, I'm off to (paying) work. Added points if you can point to the dangerousness of stayng with a (potentially) unvaxed stranger as well as some "if it were me's"

posted by Rumi'sLeftSock to Health & Fitness (14 answers total)

I got nowhere with Googling for required vaccination at this place, but I did come across this Atlantic article (paywall) called "The Odds of Getting COVID From Your Housemate Are ‘About a Coin Flip’"

All members of a household will not inevitably get COVID if someone falls sick—not even close. One recent roundup of 135 studies found that the overall spread of disease within a home—an epidemiological phenomenon that is unfortunately named “household secondary attack rate”—was 42.7 percent for the earliest forms of Omicron. The offshoots we’ve seen since then are more transmissible, so the chance of getting the virus from a roommate is now probably closer to 50 percent, Bob Wachter, the chair of UC San Francisco’s department of medicine, told me. “It’s about a coin flip,” he said. “The key thing is that it’s certainly not a sure thing.”
The explanation for why people aren’t destined to get COVID from their roommates “is a complex brew,” Wachter said. He and other experts I spoke with agreed on its main components: the infectiousness of the sick person (the “index case”), the immunity of the other people in the household, the virus itself, and the nature of the home.

Compared with someone who is unvaccinated, an infected person who is up to date on their shots has a better chance at keeping the viral load down, meaning they are poised to shed less virus to other members of the household.

All other factors being equal, a home made up entirely of unvaccinated people would be expected to have a higher household-attack rate than a home of all boosted people.

This complex brew has an invisible, maddeningly uncontrollable secret ingredient: luck. Sometimes, a person who is fully vaccinated and boosted falls sick, while a less diligent person dodges infection over and over again. “This is the hardest piece,” Wachter said. “It’s very hard to predict.” Despite our best efforts to protect ourselves and others, COVID can still break through, seemingly at random. So many factors influence susceptibility that accounting for all of them at once is nearly impossible.

A household can tilt its chances in a favorable direction by doing all the usual, proven things: wearing good masks, opening windows to increase ventilation (and buying a HEPA filter if you can afford one), separating from the sick person when possible, and testing often.

posted by jenfullmoon at 12:27 PM on August 17, 2022

Since you asked for "if it were me" input...

If it were me, I'd take the phone call, and then either ask for a follow-up email, or draft your own follow-up email and send it to your contact like "just making sure I heard you correctly".

If it were me, I'd assume that the type of people who are interested in either artist-in-residence programs or National Park intern programs would be likely to have been vaccinated. Doing both, I'd be even more likely to assume vaccination.

Can your contact provide the name and contact info of your roommate, so that you could reach out directly and ask, like you would in a college dorm?
posted by kevinbelt at 12:27 PM on August 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just to clarify, are you saying you'd be living with someone who is not part of the artist residency? (Just confused about why you wouldn't have both gotten the same info about any vaccine requirements). Everyone I know who has recently gotten Covid (and spread it to others) has been vaccinated. I've seen conflicting information about whether (or how much) vaccines can help prevent transmission after a vaccinated person does get sick. If you're comfortable living with someone who's vaccinated, I'm not sure there would be a huge difference in your own risk if they are not vaccinated. That might be especially true if someone had their most recent shot a long time ago.
posted by pinochiette at 12:31 PM on August 17, 2022 [5 favorites]

Anyway, I read this as: so you won't have to put it in writing.

I think you're incorrect to assume this implies the answer is one thing or another without talking to the person.

Anyhow, everyone I know that's gotten COVID in the past year or so was vaccinated and boosted and got it from someone who was also vaccinated and boosted so I wouldn't exactly overindex on your roommates vaccination status being the reason you do/don't get COVID.
posted by so fucking future at 12:34 PM on August 17, 2022 [17 favorites]

I wouldn't exactly overindex on your roommates vaccination status being the reason you do/don't get COVID

Came here to say this. In the current Omicron landscape, vaccination, while crucial for preventing severe disease and death, isn't doing a ton to stop transmission. It's unlikely to matter very much for your odds of getting COVID whether your roommate is vaxxed or not.
posted by Ragged Richard at 1:04 PM on August 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

First off, a vaccination requirement isn't going to do much for you. Were any requirement to exist, it would likely just be to have two shots (or even one J&J). At this point, with Omicron, the effectiveness of two shots a year or more ago against infection is pretty close to zero (as in, no protection against infection, though protection against hospitalization and death remains reasonably good). We also have plenty of evidence that vaccinated people can still spread to others quite effectively. So having someone vaccinated as a roommate is not really going to do anything for you.

That said, it would be a reasonable step to talk to this person on the phone, relay to them that you are concerned about Covid and ask them nicely to match you with someone else in the same situation, if that might be a possibility. I don't think it's an unreasonable request at this point to ask for a roommate who shares your approach to Covid precautions, since people have pretty widely varying approaches.
posted by ssg at 1:10 PM on August 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I wouldn’t care about their status, you are protected from severe illness by your vaccinations. Vaccination won’t stop them from getting it and bringing it home, it just affects the course of illness in the vaccinated person.
posted by amaire at 1:26 PM on August 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

I’ve seen NPS facilities that require masking, but I don’t think that’s universal. I would read the request for a phone call as them planning to offer to work with you, but they don’t want it documented that they gave you special treatment (maybe another attendee has volunteered that they’re vaxxed, but putting you together isn’t strictly official policy, or something). It sounds like they’ve shown that they want to help you attend, talk to them and see what’s up.
posted by momus_window at 2:12 PM on August 17, 2022

In the current Omicron landscape, vaccination, while crucial for preventing severe disease and death, isn't doing a ton to stop transmission. It's unlikely to matter very much for your odds of getting COVID whether your roommate is vaxxed or not.

We need more data, sure, I would not recommend approaching things this way. Vaccination is going to correlate with lower chances to get sick, and lower viral load when you are sick means you are less likely to infect people and the exposure causing the infection may be significantly lower.

Even the excerpt the first post in this thread mentions this and there's no reason to think it's wrong based on the data we have (which does show reduced infection chances.) Yes, everyone was hoping the vaccines would cut infection chances by 95% and we'd get herd immunity that way, and that hasn't happened. But even a 50% drop would make vax status matter for informed behavioral choices.
posted by mark k at 3:14 PM on August 17, 2022

Have the phone call, but I think you can absolutely ask during that call that she email you a copy of the policy, and/or summarize your discussion back to her in writing.

I would expect that the best case scenario policy here still allows for vaccination exemptions, though. So you may want to focus less on the policy and more on whether you, specifically, can insist on a vaccinated roommate. (I do agree that day to day behavior is probably almost as important at this point, but that probably is a conversation you have to have directly with the roommate, not one the contact can mediate for you.)
posted by Stacey at 3:36 PM on August 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Does the residency mean you'll be a federal employee? If so, I suspect the reason a federal agency wants to have this conversation by phone it will be easier to convey nuances about a policy in flux, and lets them have a frank conversation with you about their best sense of probabilities of a policy change when, as an official matter, they only have the authority to tell you what the policy is *right now*.

In short, President Biden mandated vaccination for all federal employees by executive order, but the mandate got immediately challenged in court. So the administration stopped trying to enforce it, even though the court said they could (likely because that would have caused even more legal challenges, and maybe going to the Supreme Court on the shadow docket). Oral argument in the main court case happens in September, and so things may change one way or the other after that. More on the back-and-forth here.

Bottom line: there is a vaccine mandate, but it is not currently enforced. Almost all current federal employees are vaccinated, but if your roommate will be a new employee, too, BLM won't require them to be vaccinated before mid-September at the earliest, but likely not until we know whether this is going to the Supreme Court.
posted by alligatorpear at 6:57 PM on August 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh, but also, just because the Feds aren't enforcing the vaccine mandate doesn't mean you can't ask for accommodation that involves only being housed with vaccinated people (or no one if they decide they can't ask people), particularly if your medical conditions make you more at risk for COVID and its complications. Failing to accommodate someone based on their medical conditions can be unlawful disability discrimination depending on the circumstances. The law you want to mention, if you want to go that route or ask for advice from a lawyer, is the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

(I'm not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.)
posted by alligatorpear at 7:07 PM on August 17, 2022

Response by poster: I appreciate all your answers. I do want to throw in a data point that I basically got canned for asking for accommodations at a municipal level job (had been there forever), which was startling, but not really surprising. As such I am a bit leery to ask, except that this is not a paying job; I am not getting paid, but did everything from a background check to fingerprints.

So I will not be fired, it's just a two week gig. Which would look beautiful on my c.v., but there is (hopefully) plenty of time down the road for more of these.

(That's what my EMT niece says, anyway.)

I think I will offer to do the presentation (reading, lecture, workshop) but not stay. Of course I'll know more by Friday to decide.
posted by Rumi'sLeftSock at 7:49 PM on August 17, 2022

If you have accepted the risks of interacting with people during the presentation, reading, lecture and workshop, you might as well stay for the residency.

After all, even if your vaccine-related conversation with this person is unsatisfactory for some reason, you are in control of your proximity to this person. You have your own room and bathroom, you will be busy (aka not stuck in the house 24x7), your interactions with your housemate will be at several feets' distance, you can wear a mask in the house's common areas, you can have a HEPA filter.

The risk is more to this other person than to you.
posted by nkknkk at 1:11 PM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]