A call center worker sparked a costly deep clean of his office after strolling into work and lying that he had coronavirus to get a fortnight off, police say.
Jeffrey Long reportedly walked into the Sitel facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on March 13 holding a fake doctor’s note claiming he’d been diagnosed with Covid-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, with the letter saying he needed two weeks off, it is alleged.
His note sparked the immediate evacuation of the facility amid fears Long may have spread coronavirus, which can be transmitted from person to person.
Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright said: ‘It seems to me like the fella just wanted a two-week, paid vacation.
‘You can’t do this to people.’
Sheriff Wright said the call center had to close its doors for several days as a result of Long’s alleged lies, and added: ‘I don’t know the dollar number it cost to disinfect their whole entire building, but it was a large number.
‘It wasn’t a hundred bucks. It was more than that.’
Bosses at Sitel then contacted the hospital Long claimed to have been diagnosed at, only to be told that the note was a fake, and that it did not have an official hospital stamp.
Hospital staff told Long’s employers that they had not even begun to conduct Covid-19 tests at the time he was visiting.
Long has since been arrested and charged with breach of the peace and forgery. He was released in $10,000 bond and has already been fined $200 over the incident.
Sitel have yet to say whether Long has been fired from his job.
South Carolina has so far seen 81 Covid-19 diagnosis. More than 14,600 people have been diagnosed across the United States, with over 210 people known to have died of the disease.
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