Daily COVID-19 digest

Reminder — your feedback matters: As our response to COVID-19 evolves, we want you to feel supported and that your concerns are being heard. That is why it is important that you take a moment to fill out this week’s short survey (one minute) so our leadership team can understand how you are feeling and where we can make improvements. The survey will be closing tomorrow, Friday May 8 at 12 p.m. ET. To ensure we are being as transparent as possible, we have created a dedicated page on Connect where you can view the results and understand how your feedback is being used to improve our support for employees.

Father and son donate convalescent plasma for use in national clinical trial: Richard and his youngest son, Patrick, believe they caught the coronavirus during a family ski trip to Colorado in late February. “It really wasn’t on our radar, being at risk while we were travelling,” said Patrick. “The virus was obviously present in the world but hadn’t turned into a full-blown pandemic yet.” Richard said he feels “incredibly lucky” that no one in the family developed severe symptoms. Now that he’s recovered, he hopes his donation of convalescent plasma on May 1 will help pave the way for a treatment for patients who are still sick. Read more on blood.ca.

Provincial extensions and how they affect you: In response to COVID-19, some provinces and territories are permitting temporary extensions to validation periods for licenses and health coverage. To learn how these temporary government measures affect you, we have created a chart breaking down the provisions and how to access them in your province.

New Microsoft feature to spot phishing emails: To better protect you against online threats, IT is implementing a new Microsoft feature to assist with tagging email received from senders outside Canadian Blood Services. This feature adds a tag to the subject line of the email that reads, “External”. This will enable you to spot illegitimate and phishing messages, for example, an email purporting to be from your manager or colleague with an external tag. It’s important to note that an email message with this external tag does not necessarily mean that the email is malicious — only that you should exercise increased caution before clicking any links or attachments included within the email. If you have any cyber security specific questions, please contact the IT security team CBS.Information.Security@blood.ca.

About the daily digest

This daily digest will highlight the latest policy and employee support measures, resources to help you manage our new reality and original content like articles and videos to remind us that what we do matters. Things are moving quickly, so you can expect to hear from us daily. No access to email? No problem — all this information and more can be found on blood.ca/employees from any device, no login required.

Click here to read past editions of the daily digest.

Have questions? Check out blood.ca/employees or email us at communications@blood.ca