3: Andrew Kaunert

Safety Manager, Sanitation Solutions Plus

Andrew Kaunert is a safety manager for a company that cleans food processing facilities, a crucial service in the best of times.  He worked through the entire shutdown, along with his father who owns the company, but found himself encountering a lot of staffing problems. Many of his employees were afraid of contracting COVID, especially in their line of work, so the workers who remained on staff, Andrew included, were impelled to take on a large amount of overtime. Even as vaccines become more widely available, many of Andrew’s staff are still hesitant to return. 

Andrew himself was very frightened in the early days of the pandemic because he suffers from asthma and was unsure of the amount of risk he would be facing if he got sick. For the first two weeks of the shutdown, he also stayed out of work for his own safety and that of the five people in his household. However, as more information about COVID became more readily available, Andrew started to relax a little as it became clear to him that as a young, healthy person he was at much lower risk for a serious illness. Though Andrew never contracted COVID himself, six of his close friends all tested positive, forcing him to really reconsider the hygiene and sanitation of every situation, not just in his professional life, but in his personal life as well.