It has been almost a month since Public Health Madison and Dane County’s (PHMDC) public health emergency expired and what a month it has been. Even without the parameters of public health orders, Dane County continues to progress locally towards a stronger and stronger COVID-19 recovery. At the time of writing, cases per day were lower than the cases seen in May of 2020 and percent COVID-19 positivity continued to hover below 1% week after week. 68% of residents countywide (78% of the eligible population and 96% of people ages 65+) had started and 62% had completed their vaccine series. PHMDC now turns its focus to providing mobile vaccination opportunities in areas of our region where vaccinations have been locally lower, and we appreciate their continued efforts to increase the potential for herd immunity for all of our population. We are so grateful to be part of a community committed to its collective health, the fruits of all of our efforts certainly seem to be paying off. While we continue to monitor the County’s efforts to vaccinate the community and control COVID-19 outbreaks in the face of variants, the overall positive outlook for local epidemiology gives us confidence in our ability to relax some of our stricter prevention protocols during this reprieve. Here’s how things have progressed over the past month and where we are headed.
Store Hours Change July 5 to 7:30-9 At All Locations
We are pleased to finally be able to open all three locations at 7:30am again daily, and that all three stores can again support staying open until 9pm. Store hours changed and continued to change to support changing cleaning tasks, labor needs, and shortages throughout the pandemic. We know this has been confusing at times and we appreciate your patience with us and are glad to return to offering early morning service and consistency!
Wellness Wednesday Starts Again July 7
Starting this month we welcome back the popular Wellness Wednesday benefit for Owners. On the first Wednesday of every month, you can enjoy an additional 10% off of all wellness and bodycare items (see the ad on the back cover to see what’s included. We suspended this benefit early in the pandemic to avoid overcrowding, and were unable to offer an alternative that was financially sustainable. We are thrilled to bring this benefit back for everyone to enjoy.
Face Coverings Now Strongly Encouraged for Unvaccinated People Ages 2+
As of June 2, we lifted the requirement for customers to wear face coverings, but kept the employee face covering policy and continued to ask customers to consider wearing face coverings in the wake of PHMDC’s orders expiring out of an abundance of caution. This mirrored how our face covering policies came to be: we first made face coverings required for employees as epidemiologists began recommending such workplace policies and ahead of PHMDC’s face covering mandate, and then—shortly before the mandate—we implemented a requirement for customers. This hybrid approach to recovering from the public health emergency bought the Co-op and our employees’ union, United Electric Local 1186, time to assess the public health data and our own vaccination rates at the Co-op, and what benchmarks we wanted to set.
PHMDC claims targets for herd immunity lie between 60% and 90%. Co-op management met with UE1186 the week of June 7 and came to mutual agreement that since Co-op employees have been voluntarily reporting well over 60% full vaccination status at all sites since June 3, that we would lift the employee face covering policy and promote the CDC’s recommendations for unvaccinated individuals starting three days after PHMDC reported 60% full vaccination in Dane County. Dane County reached that goal by the end of day June 10 and the employee face covering policy was replaced with CDC recommendations by June 14.
The CDC, PHMDC, the Co-op, and UE Local 1186 strongly encourages everyone ages two and older who has not been vaccinated for COVID-19 to wear a face covering while inside the Co-op.
Anyone Who Wants to Wear a Face Covering May Wear One
While we are no longer requiring customers nor employees at this time to wear face coverings, all employees and customers, regardless of vaccination status, may continue to wear face coverings while at the Co-op if they wish to do so. Since we rescinded the requirements, we have seen many customers and employees, some of which have disclosed that they are vaccinated, continue to wear them either for all or some of their time on Co-op property. As our locality is no longer under a public health emergency, we encourage the community to trust each other when it comes to personal health decisions. We do not judge your health status based on your decision to wear a face covering.
Our Workforce Is Committed to Safety
The vast majority of our workforce is unable to complete their work duties from home. The majority of our workforce is also full time. That means that for 15 months, many employees spent 18-24% of their waking hours required to wear face coverings, often while doing very physical labor, and also while needing to communicate at a distance, or from behind a barrier. The managers and employees working in these conditions embraced and endorsed these requirements driven by our mission to support customers and other employees. Enforcing face covering requirements has not been easy, especially for managers and employees who have had some challenging conversations with people who disagreed with our policies, but the data is showing that the effort made a difference when it needed to do so.
We also have supported vaccination opportunities throughout the pandemic. Employee reporting on vaccination status is voluntary and anonymous at the Co-op and have been both grateful and encouraged to see that well over 60% of our employees across sites have taken the opportunity to vaccinate, and more are continuing to get vaccinated as they are able.
Our consistent commitment to face coverings; fostering social distancing whenever possible; and working with UE1186 to provide ample opportunity to take time off for COVID-19 symptoms, testing, recovery, and vaccination has kept our workplace COVID-19 case percentages below 3% throughout the pandemic. These precautions also allowed the Co-op to entirely avoid workplace cluster outbreaks, and yielded strong workforce vaccination rates. We are so proud of our team,
and trust our entire workforce to make good personal decisions when it comes to wearing face coverings and continuing to serve the public in a healthful manner as conditions continue to improve.
We Continue To Monitor Statistics
Our work is not done! We recognize that there is still a global pandemic, that not everyone has had the access or opportunity to be vaccinated, and that COVID-19 variants will persist and continue to challenge the science. For now, we trust PHMDC’s guidance and the numbers they are reporting, and that gives us confidence that we can relax our guidelines and policies related to COVID-19. Yet, we acknowledge that the guidance could change, and that we may need to be prepared to make adjustments again for public safety if warranted. We are prepared to be flexible, and we appreciate all our Owners for their continued support and willingness to roll with the changes and challenges we face together.
We Continue to Offer Masks and Curbside/Delivery Services
If you are not vaccinated and forgot your face covering to come to the store, or if you would simply be more comfortable wearing a face covering for your own safety or (for example) to promote wearing face coverings to children or others who cannot be vaccinated, please stop by customer service; we still have disposable face masks complimentary for your use while you shop.
Would you prefer to avoid coming into the store at all? We still have you covered! Visit www.willystreet.coop/curbside to learn the delivery and pickup options available to you. Your delivery or pickup can be contactless too.
Actual Store Occupancy Remains Lower Than Capacity Allows
Since we lifted our capacity restrictions in tandem with the rescind of the local public health emergency, we’ve been monitoring our store capacity levels. Even at peak times, the occupancy levels currently trend at all three locations between 36-56% of the capacity of the retail footprint. We measure occupancy as the maximum number of employees that may be staffed at one time plus the number of customers who enter and exit the store counted by our SafeCount monitoring system. Our maximum occupancy capacity is calculated at 60 square feet per person. While we are still seeing fewer transactions than we managed pre-COVID at all three locations, they are closer to pre-COVID transaction levels, and we do not anticipate that any retail location would face the likelihood of reaching maximum retail capacity.
Interested in keeping your distance? You can see how busy the stores are by visiting www.willystreet.coop and looking at how busy we are in real time where the store locations and phone numbers are listed. If you are planning ahead to shop, you can check our Google Business listing to find both popular and unpopular times to shop.
• East: http://g.page/WSC-east
• North: http://g.page/WSC-north
• West: http://g.page/WSC-west
Thanks for Playing it Safe
It’s a testament to our community that we are at this turning point. The weight is lifting thanks to our steadfast commitments to each other’s health and that is reason for hope. We mourn for the loss and sacrifice we and our families and friends have experienced and endured during this wrenching year and a half, and are humbled by our collective ability to hold each other up, evolve, and continue moving forward. It’s because of you that we have progressed through the hard times and will continue to progress. Thank you for playing it safe, and continuing to cooperate with each other. The news improves slowly but surely, and here’s to hoping for even better news in the coming months ahead.