The United States Postal Service was able to deliver mail on time. The Omicron variant is spreading among its employees.
The USPS reported on Thursday that it delivered nearly 90% of parcels on time from October 1 to Christmas Eve, an improvement over the previous quarter. The USPS expects to deliver more than 12 billion pieces of mail by New Year's Day.
Changes to the size of its workforce and operations made this year's holiday season relatively smooth, according to the Postal Service. The USPS has added 185,000 workers since last year, installed 112 new package-sorting machines, and added 13 million square feet of space to handle the increased volume of mail and packages.
It's a far cry from last year, when the Postal Service was experiencing a historic volume of deliveries that led to an overflow of parcels and employees. Parcels were sitting on trucks for several days waiting to be sorted, and it was difficult to walk around when packages were stacked so high. Employees were not allowed to take a day off between Thanksgiving and Christmas in order to keep up with the flood of packages.
Capacity limits on airlines and trucks that transported the mail, as well as higher package volumes, were felt by the agency. Retailers had to use the Postal Service to ship their goods after private firms warned of limited capacity.
The American Postal Workers Union said in December 2020 that 19,000 of the Postal Service's 644,000 workers were sick or in isolation due to the coronaviruses.
The union told David Sharp on Friday that Postal Service workers are getting sick again as the Omicron variant spreads.
As of Christmas Eve, 6,500 postal workers were in a state of isolation. The number has grown to 8,000 this week.
