WXYZ — Mail delivery times in metro Detroit are noticeably slower these days, due in part to temporary staffing shortages and a surge in package volume because of COVID-19.
People's shopping habits have changed due to the stay-at-home order, meaning more and more items are shipping through the mail.
Package surges happen every year around the holidays, but president of American Postal Workers Union Local 480-481 Roscoe Woods pointed out, it's never been met with a pandemic before.
"In the early onset of this in mid-March we were averaging a couple hundred employees out of our largest facility due to the issues associated with coronavirus," Woods told Action News.
He said USPS allowed employees at a Troy call center to telework, but before they could implement that, around a dozen people got sick with the virus.
“This union lost its chief steward to COVID and then a couple days later we lost another member to COVID," he told Action News.
