Former Obama OSHA officials, House Democrats and others who have criticized the Trump administration for not issuing a temporary emergency standard to protect health care workers from the coronavirus pandemic are welcoming OSHA’s interim response plan to reduce such risks, but they are renewing calls for the agency to set a binding standard.
OSHA is aiming to ease healthcare workers’ access to respirators during the coronavirus pandemic by issuing two memos offering enforcement discretion of its respiratory protection standard for employers who must otherwise use NIOSH-approved respirators or devices from other countries.
The Obama-era head of OSHA is calling for the agency to quickly issue an emergency infectious disease standard and cite employers who “egregiously” ignore Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance on airborne diseases in order to protect health and other works from the coronavirus.
Top House Democrats say they will include a mandate that OSHA issue an emergency temporary infectious disease standard to address risks from the coronavirus to healthcare employees and expand protections in other industries in their next bill to address the pandemic after they were forced to drop the mandate from prior measures.
Construction and contracting firms are urging OSHA to soften its guidance on how the sector should record workplace absences due to COVID-19 during the current pandemic, warning that the current requirement to determine if an infection is “work-related” will put employers “in an almost impossible position.”
The Senate’s massive $2 trillion emergency bill to address fallout from the coronavirus pandemic provides billions of dollars to increase supply of personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers, but does not mandate an OSHA emergency standard for the workers that House Democrats are seeking.
OSHA has reworked weeks-old guidance for waste companies where workers could handle material contaminated by COVID-19 to say that the virus “does not require special precautions” other than those usually needed for waste handling, reinforcing claims by waste firms that their workers are already protected.
Two top House Democrats are urging Vice President Mike Pence to protect health care workers from coronavirus risks by immediately appointing a senior Trump administration official to coordinate the supply and distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE) to the workers who are at high risk of exposure.
OSHA has issued temporary guidance for discretionary enforcement of its respiratory protection standard that eases some requirements in order to boost access to adequate filtering facepiece respirators for healthcare workers during the coronavirus pandemic, but the guide falls short of Democrats’ calls for an emergency healthcare standard.
The Trump administration has blocked language in Democrats’ proposed coronavirus response bill that would force OSHA to set a temporary “emergency” standard to supply healthcare workers with protective gear, and the hospital industry is warning that the gear is not available in the quantities an OSHA rule would require.