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Whether they’re floaters or not, CVS and Walgreens employees say that management rarely tells them when a co-worker shows symptoms or tests positive. But employees stationed at a single location are more likely than their roving counterparts to learn about such developments by word of mouth. While managers "have avoided giving us any notifications when someone gets sick," said Fram, who stays put at the Walgreens in upper Manhattan, "it’s such a tiny district that we all know each other’s business."

Floaters said that they are unaware of what’s happened not only before they’ve come into a store, but also after they’ve departed. In one case, a floater stopped working at a store, and days later an employee there fell sick; the floater said he was not informed at the time and still doesn’t know whether he was also exposed or even the source of the exposure.

"Because you’re not on a conference call or on a mailing list with a core group of employees and managers, you don’t receive the same regular communications that others would," the Dallas floater said. "You are relying on others to play telephone with you about what’s going on."

When employees notify CVS or Walgreens that they are presumed to have COVID-19 or have tested positive, they are advised to quarantine for two weeks, for which they can receive paid leave. The CDC advises that workplaces then identify and contact any individual who "has been within 6 feet of the infected employee for a prolonged period of time." In practice, however, each workplace exercises significant discretion to define what prolonged means and just how risky the exposure was.

One floater in Ohio described receiving a last-minute change to her schedule and showing up to a store where co-workers told her that there had been a confirmed case. "Everything was done secretively and the safety of the employees [was] endangered," the floater wrote in an email to ProPublica in April. "If the company is sending people to work in a store that recently has a positive case, they should tell the people what to expect. They should, at least, tell them what happened there and advise them to wear masks or take precautions."

Employees in several CVS and Walgreens stores say that district managers have referred to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, as a justification for not informing them about their potential exposure. "They tell us it’s HIPAA, but they really just don’t want us to be scared or to have to shut down the store," said one pharmacist, who worked in a store where neither he nor floaters were told by managers that multiple workers had fallen ill with the virus.

HIPAA, however, does not apply to this situation, said Joy Pritts, the former chief privacy officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "In this case, it’s being used as a shield," she said. HIPAA protects health information shared between patients and providers in health care settings, but it does not govern the notifications employers may provide to employees in a pandemic, she added.

While the Americans with Disabilities Act requires employers to keep medical information about individual employees confidential, employers are encouraged by the CDC and local health agencies to communicate anonymized information that may prevent the spread of an infectious disease. "When businesses don’t want to share information, they often blame privacy laws," Pritts said. "But they are often making a business calculation as to whether to share the health information, not a legal one."

CVS and Walgreens did not directly respond to questions about whether managers were improperly citing HIPAA when employees sought information about possible exposure. A Walgreens spokesperson said that HIPAA and other privacy policies do not "prevent us from identifying and contacting employees who may be at risk from exposure to COVID-19."

During the first week of April, the Dallas floater was offered an open shift at a store. CVS didn’t tell him that there had been two positive cases at that location, but he was lucky enough to know the manager there, who tipped him off, he said.

Once again he faced the same grim calculus as so many part-time workers in America: risk exposure or lose a paycheck. "If I don’t take the shift, there are plenty of other people who would be willing to pick up those hours," he said. "They will pull people from all over Texas if they need to fill that shift, and they are banking on somebody not caring about the risk to do it."

Nevertheless, he declined.