DC Mayor Muriel Bowser announced on Tuesday that all DC Government employees who work in agencies that report to her office are required to get vaccinated against COVID-19 by Sunday, September 19.
Around 19,907 out of the 36,700 employees of the DC Government have reported so far that they have been fully vaccinated. It accounts for 54 percent of the total workforce, according to the Mayor’s Office. Approximately 15,000 employees have not declared their vaccination status to the DC Department of Human Resources.
“While this vaccination requirement applies to employees who work in agencies that report to the Mayor, which includes approximately 32,700 employees, all independent agencies are highly encouraged to adopt the requirement,” said a release from Bowser’s office.
All fully vaccinated employees of the DC Government are granted an eight-hour time-off award after they update their status in PeopleSoft. Employees are given two hours of administrative leave per dose to get vaccinated.
Vaccination against COVID-19 will be a requirement for all DC Government employees who work in agencies that report to the Mayor. Employees will have until Sunday, September 19, 2021 to meet the job requirement of being fully vaccinated. https://t.co/6LQHnIoXun
— Mayor Muriel Bowser (@MayorBowser) August 10, 2021
It was emphasized in the release that vaccines are a critical tool for saving lives, as well as reducing the severity of the illness in infected people, and stopping the spread of COVID-19.
The District has seen a 95 percent decrease in deaths stemming from the infectious disease as of June 2021 — when more than half of the city’s population was fully vaccinated — compared to January 2021 when less than one percent of the population was fully vaccinated.
DC recently launched a new dashboard on breakthrough coronavirus cases that provide information about:
- Total cases, broken down by week and type of vaccine
- Demographic data, broken down by age range, gender, race, and ethnicity
- Time since fully vaccinated
- Medical overview, including whether infected individuals were symptomatic or asymptomatic, whether individuals were hospitalized, and lives lost
“Breakthrough COVID-19 cases” are the cases in which a fully vaccinated person tests positive for the infectious disease.
Current data on the dashboard indicates the effectiveness of the vaccines with only 546 breakthrough cases — 0.18 percent of all 300,000 fully vaccinated people — reported.
Four Fully Vaccinated DC Residents Died of COVID-19 Since January