COVID outbreaks exaggerated as bankers return to office

Are you back in the office? Have you recently had COVID, and more pertinently, have you caught COVID from an infected colleague who breathed on you at the desk or in the elevator? If you have, we'd like to hear from you - either at the email address below, or in the comments section at the bottom of this article.

For the moment, though, it seems that some of the more febrile claims about COVID infections in the office maybe be a bit overblown. The Litquidity Instagram account yesterday posted various anonymous allegations about COVID circulating in NYC bank offices, including one stating that a managing director at Deutsche Bank came into the office with COVID for a week, and another claiming that people with COVID on JPMorgan's trading floor are "never really sent home."

Banks don't comment about the prevalence of COVID in their buildings, but the latest complaints follow a series of similar gripes early in the pandemic before people began working remotely. At JPMorgan, for example, a managing director spread the virus to 20 people on the trading floor in March 2020 after spending a day coughing in the office. At Goldman Sachs, an MD came in with a fever as markets imploded around the same time. Last April we were told of people coughing blood at back-up sites and of chaos as hotels in the vicinity of out-of-town trading floors closed down.

This time, however, the complaints may be overdone. Deutsche Bank insiders say there's no record of an MD coming into the New York office and spreading the virus for a week. At most, there was a DB director who came in for a morning and was sent home in the afternoon. Five colleagues were asked to work from home as a result; none of them got COVID. 

Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available (Telegram: @SarahButcher)

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