Miami-Dade changes rules on when county employees with COVID-19 can return to work

Miami-Dade County employees who contracted COVID-19 can now return to work without testing negative for the disease as long as enough time has passed and most symptoms are improving.

Before the recent change, Miami-Dade, a government with more than 28,000 employees, required two negative COVID-19 tests as well as approval from a county healthcare center before an employee could return to in-person work.

“Please note that employees may still want to obtain a negative test, for their own peace of mind, and they may share the results with you, but two negative tests are no longer required to return to work,” Arleene Cuellar, the county’s human-resources director, said in a Feb. 19 email to Miami-Dade department heads.

The county’s new rules follow federal guidelines centered around how long someone is likely to be contagious after contracting COVID, rather than how long people will test positive for the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that quarantines last for 10 days after COVID symptoms begin, and until the person is fever-free without medication for 24 hours.

The new policy brings county government in line with the Miami-Dade school system and county-owned Jackson Health hospital system, two other large government employers that already rely on symptoms to decide when employees can return to the workplace.

“We follow the symptom-based strategy for symptomatic employees and the time-based strategy for asymptomatic,” said Jackson spokesperson Lidia Amoretti.

The new Miami-Dade system relies on voluntary disclosure of a county employee’s COVID recovery. A “return to work” form posted on the county’s employee website asks for the relevant dates of a COVID-19 diagnosis and when a fever was last present.

Miami-Dade’s new policy sets up three tiers of quarantine for a workforce that’s the second largest in Miami-Dade, behind the school system.

For an employee without COVID-19 symptoms, the county policy allows returning to in-person working 10 days after a positive test for the virus or after symptoms first appeared. For someone with moderate symptoms, the employee needs to wait 10 days plus go at least 24 hours without a fever and have improving symptoms.

But the new rules don’t apply to a trademark COVID symptom. The Cuellar email states: “Loss of taste and smell may persist for weeks or months after recovery and need not delay the end of isolation.”

The third tier applies to employees who experienced “severe” COVID symptoms or have unrelated health conditions affecting their immune system. For this category, the wait time is 20 days.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava approved the new policy, which was recommended by Dr. Peter Paige, an administrator at Jackson who also serves as Levine Cava’s chief medical officer.

Levine Cava was diagnosed with COVID just two weeks into her term as mayor, suffering moderate, flu-like symptoms. She returned to County Hall two weeks later — after, she said, following the prior policy requiring two negative tests and a video consultation with a medical provider at Jackson.

“Under the new policies, I would have come back a few days earlier,” she said Tuesday. “I was ready to come back.”

Now in its second week, the new policy isn’t yet universal.

Daniel Junior, director of the county’s Corrections Department, said the jail system was still requiring one negative COVID-19 test before employees returned to work.

Raquel Regalado, a county commissioner who tested positive for COVID on Feb. 11, returned to the commission dais on Tuesday after participating in meetings through a video screen for nearly three weeks. Her office said in a press release Tuesday she was “cleared to return to her normal duties” after receiving two negative COVID tests.

Se’Adoreia Brown, president of the AFSCME 199 county labor union, said the prior policy left her members burning through sick time awaiting the required negative tests to get back to work. “We had some employees testing negative the first time, then positive the second time, going back and forth,” she said. “This virus has caused some employees to exhaust all their leave.”

This story was originally published March 3, 2021 at 6:00 AM.