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Floaters are often younger graduates of pharmacy schools, though many late-career pharmacists also take up the role, prizing its freedom from the demands of a single store’s bureaucracy. Neither CVS nor Walgreens provides information on the percentage of its workforce — some half a million workers combined — that floats.

Many large companies have come to rely on a temporary pool of workers, whether they are in-house or drawn from an agency, said Susan Houseman, the director of research at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a think tank in Kalamazoo, Michigan. "This kind of on-demand workforce, where workers just appear as regular employees but have unpredictable schedules, is very prevalent in retail, restaurants and across the hospitality industry," she said. Such precarious work schedules can make it difficult for temps, substitutes, floaters and part-time employees to benefit from the same safety precautions as their stationary counterparts, she added.

Whitney Abbott floated for about nine years as a pharmacist, traveling anywhere within a two-hour radius, until she settled at a Walgreens in Columbia, South Carolina. She’s witnessed firsthand the pressures on current floaters to pick up part-time work. "If you see a shift pop up, even if it’s in a hot spot, you can’t really afford to turn it down," she said. Now the ex-floater is worried that floaters taking shifts at her location may be carrying the virus. After a co-worker contracted the virus from an unknown source, Abbott, who is in her third trimester of pregnancy, was recently quarantined for possible exposure. Multiple floaters have been filling in for her. "They could have come from a town that was a hot spot and potentially brought it into our store," she said, "and the next day they could be back in a small town where everyone knows everybody."

Such a travel dynamic is "exactly how a virus like this keeps spreading," according to Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. "The disease follows people," he said. "So if there’s a higher risk in a populated area, and you travel to a rural area, you are bringing the disease from a higher-risk area to a lower-risk area."

Conditions at CVS and Walgreens may heighten the dangers for floaters and for those who come into contact with them. Depending on a store’s layout, recommended social distancing measures can be difficult if not impossible to enforce behind the counter. "Our locations are too small to socially distance while we work, so we’re potentially exposing all sorts of people," said Fram, the Walgreens tech in Manhattan, who spends hours in the same small space as colleagues.

Despite the cleanings stipulated by both Walgreens and CVS, employees said that it is difficult to clean stores frequently and that supplies remain scarce. When someone tested positive at one of the CVS stores where the Dallas floater worked, the people in charge of sanitizing it were the pharmacist and the lead technician, who cleaned the counters, keyboards and phones with Lysol wipes. It was a valiant effort, he said, but hardly the work of professionals.

CVS and Walgreens did not respond to questions about employee complaints that it’s hard to maintain social distance and that cleaning is inconsistent.