Get Reopening Tenants to Use 'Contact Logging'

It’s in your interests to ensure tenants maintain social distancing in the leased space.

As businesses reopen, landlords face the challenge of helping their tenants comply with social distancing requirements. Instrumental to that effort will be ensuring that tenants have the capability to track actual encounters on the leased property.

Digital technology offers one possibility, through the use of apps, wearables, and other so-called “contact tracing” solutions that monitor encounters in real time. But in addition to being privacy-invasive, these solutions may be too costly and cumbersome for many tenants.

You may want to recommend that tenants consider using this cheaper, easier, and less intrusive manual contact logging method instead.

What’s at Stake

Without a vaccine or treatment, social distancing—that is, keeping at least 6 feet away from other people—has been the primary defense against COVID-19. Even though the shutdown phase of the pandemic is ending, businesses, including your tenants, will have to keep following social distancing requirements as a condition of reopening. And while tenants bear the legal responsibility, landlords have a significant interest in ensuring that social distancing is maintained in the leased space.  

The Role of Contact Logging

“Contact tracing” is the generic term for a system of gathering data about individuals’ physical encounters with other people. In the COVID-19 context, this data plays a crucial role in social distancing compliance monitoring by enabling the tenant to:

• Analyze the number, duration, and nature of potentially dangerous encounters—those closer than 6 feet—between people at the premises; and
• Identify the individuals who were involved in those encounters in case it becomes necessary to notify them of potential exposure later—for example, a vendor who spent a lot of time working in close contact with an employee who tested positive for COVID-19 24 hours later.  

How Contact Logging Works

Contact logging is a method of contact tracing in which tenants gather the data manually by requiring each person who comes to their facilities to complete a form logging the contacts they had while they were at the premises. As with any other system, contact logging requires clearly defined metrics. For purposes of social distancing, the key metric is contact closer than 6 feet.

But tenants also need to maintain a sense of proportionality and accept the facts that some close contact is bound to occur at some point during the day and that COVID-19 infection risk is a function of not only distance but also duration of exposure. So, rather than every close encounter, the better metric would be close encounters lasting longer than a prescribed time period, such as 10 seconds. Two other key metrics:

• “Dangerous contacts” that pose immediate hazard of infection regardless of distance and duration—for example, somebody sneezes or coughs on another person; and
• “Prolonged close contact,” a cumulative close contact exposure threshold (such as 15 minutes in a single shift) triggering the need for discipline, notification, or other organizational response by the tenant.

The Mechanics of Contact Logging

For as long as the social distancing mandate remains in effect, tenants should require all persons who come to their premises—not just employees but also vendors, clients, customers, and visitors—to complete a log of close or dangerous contacts they had during their shift or visit, including the name of the person and approximate duration of close contacts in minutes and seconds, and submit it to a supervisor. You can adapt our Model Form: Help Tenants Ensure Social Distancing at Leased Premises, below, for your own use.

The supervisor should then process the logs to confirm that each employee and visitor present during the shift submitted one, flag any dangerous contacts, and total the cumulative minutes and seconds of each close contact time to determine whether there was any prolonged close contact.

Organizational Response Action

Tenants should require supervisors to notify their COVID-19 coordinator or other designated person of any dangerous or prolonged close contact immediately for an organizational determination of what, if anything, to do in response. For example, should an employee be barred from entry and ordered to go into self-isolation? Do visitors involved in prolonged close contact need to be notified of their potential exposure?

The supervisor should also follow up with any employee subject to prolonged close contact the very next shift to go over the social distancing rules, get the employee’s explanation, and determine whether to impose discipline in accordance with the tenant’s progressive discipline policies.

Practical Pointer: In addition to providing this information to tenants, landlords can also apply the same strategy to ensure compliance with social distancing requirements at their own facilities.