We imagine most people have read the article in the Herald by now of our COVID-19 situation at our company Tile Art, and we feel we don’t need to comment any longer on the particulars other than we wanted to make everyone aware of our disturbing experience with San Juan Basin Public Health and Mercy testing.
As ownership, we never received any communication from SJBPH as to what the protocol is as an employer who needs to deal with a COVID-positive employee in this stressful situation. On our own initiative, we did what we felt was right by CDC and state and local guidelines. We all were tested. Most of those tests took on average 10 days to receive from Mercy – not five days as promised.
On the sixth day, we all started calling the provided number to get results as instructed only to be sent from one message to the next and not getting an answer. Only on our own initiative, and after calling SJBPH, were we able to speak with someone. We were told, “Sorry, I guess we made a mistake. We have a lot of new people,” along with a lot of excuse-making in our opinion on their part.
Our hope is SJBPH and Mercy use our situation to make much needed improvements. We are also hoping our experience does not cause other local employers facing our situation to go underground. That is not what we need right now in these challenging times.
Paul BeasleyDurango
