© Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune/Chicago Tribune/TNS Chicago police patrol the CTA Red Line subway at the Jackson station March 5, 2020.

About 6% of the entire Chicago Police Department was on sick leave Monday as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to have an impact on city operations.

More than 800 Chicago police employees — most of them sworn officers, though some civilians as well — were out sick with wide-ranging ailments, but the increased numbers also were likely due to employees who took time off for precautionary measures due to the coronavirus, CPD officials said.

The department has more than 13,000 sworn officers and several hundred more civilian employees.

So far, 49 Chicago police officers have tested positive for the coronavirus. Only a handful have had to be hospitalized, but at least one was reported in critical condition, Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Monday.

“And the rule that we have here is if you are near somebody who was positive and you’re symptomatic then you are automatically put on sick leave, on the medical,” Guglielmi said.

The department’s sick leave numbers ran as high as around 7% at the end of last week, Guglielmi said. On an average day, about 2 1/4 u00bd% to 4% of the department doesn’t report for duty for health reasons.

“The Department was notified of 29 members that have tested positive for the COVID-19 virus since Friday,” Chicago police interim Superintendent Charlie Beck said in a department-wide memo on Monday.

Guglielmi said the number of CPD employees out on sick leave is “nowhere near some of the other (major U.S. city) departments are experiencing” due to COVID-19.

CPD officials have contingency plans in place in case staffing for the country’s second largest police force shrinks to dire levels. In an extreme situation, for instance, CPD could move its officers to 12-hour days, up from their normal 8 1/4 u00bd-hour shifts, and cancel days off.

But Guglielmi said the department has not yet resorted to that. So far, he noted, CPD only canceled days off for patrol bureau officers on March 21, the first day of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s stay-at-home order.

One measure the department took to keep its staffing levels up was separating employees who work out of police headquarters to different day-off groups, moving them to four days a week with two days off. Before, many of those employees worked 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

That action reduced the number of employees working in confined spaces at a given time to enhance social distancing, Guglielmi said. Some of those officers could also be used in other units across the city experiencing staffing shortages, he said.

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