VOW3 Volkswagen AG

By William Boston 

WOLFSBURG, Germany -- The day after summer vacations ended and employees returned to work, Volkswagen AG's in-house medical unit was faced with a reality it had been fearing for weeks.

An employee at the company's seat-building unit who had returned from vacation in Croatia tested positive for Covid-19.

With the resumption of tourism and summer festivities in Europe fueling a new rise in infections, companies that have been virus-proofing their premises for the winter are facing a fresh challenge: preventing employees returning from the continent's sacrosanct two- or three-week summer break from bringing the virus back to work with them.

"Every day now the European region reports an average of over 26,000 new Covid-19 cases," Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization's regional director for Europe, said last week. "People have been dropping their guard."

Germany has said that 40% of new cases in the country were contracted abroad, adding that regions of the country where school holidays have been over for several weeks have been seeing a slowdown in the pace of new infections.

A study of 55,000 patients released last week by the Robert Koch Institute, the country's leading epidemiological body, showed 5,800 infections occurred in the workplace, the third most represented location after nursing homes and households. The findings highlight businesses' vulnerability to infections as governments remain desperate to avoid a second lockdown.

In a separate study, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said 1,844 people across the region had been infected in factories, offices, on construction sites, in stores and in mines by the beginning of July.

Some governments have taken action. After a sharp rise in infections linked to the relaxation of lockdown and distancing measures in daily life and during vacations, France made face masks mandatory in the workplace this month. Politicians in Germany have called for similar steps. Some European countries have resumed restricting international travel or requiring that visitors quarantine upon arrival.

When news of the infection broke at the Volkswagen unit, the medical team jumped into action. The employee, who wasn't identified for privacy reasons, was immediately isolated from co-workers, who were also tested by the company's in-house medical team. By the end of the year, VW aims to have 10 such testing labs at its factories in Germany.

Local health officials were called in and began tracing the patient's contacts. Employees who had interacted with the infected co-worker were sent home for a two-week quarantine.

So far, the infection appears to be contained. But this week, two employees at VW's main campus in Wolfsburg tested positive after returning from their summer vacations, and the response team was rolled out again.

"Before the summer vacations began we asked ourselves: What happens when people return from their holidays?," Gunnar Kilian, VW's board member in charge of human resources, told reporters on Tuesday. "We also want to be prepared for the fall, when infections will rise, and do our part to make sure there isn't another lockdown."

ASML Holding NV, a Veldhoven, Netherlands-based semiconductor-equipment maker, is putting into practice lessons learned from earlier this year when some of its Dutch employees were required to quarantine at home upon returning from ski vacations in Austria.

"We notified our employees before the start of the [summer] vacation period that ASML cannot and will not tell employees where they can or cannot go on vacation, but we do impose rules regarding the access to ASML sites when employees return," said Monique Mols, the company's spokeswoman.

Returnees "have been identified as a risk," Mathias Braje, head of business software group SAP SE's global Covid-19 task force, told The Wall Street Journal. "We ask people to please work from home for at least 14 days upon their return."

At the end of June, SAP employed 43,184 people in its European operations, and had a global workforce of 101,379 employees.

Unlike VW, the German software company isn't providing on-site testing, though Mr. Braje didn't rule out doing so in the future. For now, he feels that government testing at international border crossings such as airports -- now mandatory in Germany for anyone returning from a high-risk destination -- is sufficient.

So far, he says he isn't aware of any SAP employees testing positive after their vacation. The company posted messages on its intranet to inform employees of the risks before the vacation season started.

"We really try to educate our employees so that they understand what are the risky spots," he said. "On a country level, specific information has been sent. But we don't interfere with their private travel plans."

About 85% of SAP's global workforce is still working from home. Its 40 U.S. sites remain closed and only a few will open by late September as a test. In Germany, its home base, SAP employs about 23,000 people and 10% of them have returned to the office.

A survey of European workers published by Morgan Stanley in August showed that around 53% of European workers overall have returned to the workplace full time, but just 42% of office workers have.

"The majority of our people in the U.S. will work from home until the end of the year," Mr. Braje said.

Sebastian Fritz, the European chief of Somerville, Mass.-based FormLabs Inc., a 3-D printer manufacturer, sent an email to employees on Aug. 19, warning about the risks posed by returning vacationers.

"As vacations are coming to an end, we need to implement some risk measures to protect everyone in our office," Mr. Fritz wrote in the email, which was viewed by the Journal.

FormLabs employees in Europe who visit a country considered a Covid-19 hot spot need to provide the company's human-resources department with a negative coronavirus test result and quarantine for 10 days before returning to work.

"Fortunately, we've not yet had anyone test positive upon their return," Mr. Fritz told the Journal.

Write to William Boston at william.boston@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 27, 2020 09:56 ET (13:56 GMT)

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