A federal rule that could have helped protect health-care workers from coronavirus has been stuck in regulatory limbo since the start of the Trump administration.
An Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule in the works since 2010 was designed to ensure that employers have in place comprehensive programs to protect health-care workers against infectious diseases. Without such standards, compliance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines on infection control can’t be easily enforced.
Although OSHA has a rule protecting workers from blood-borne pathogens (and says[1] some provisions of that standard could help limit the spread of pathogens by other means), it has no overarching standard for diseases not spread via blood.
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With the start of the current administration, the rule was removed from OSHA’s active rule-making agenda and relegated to a list of “long-term actions” with no date for moving forward. “Putting it on the long-term agenda essentially means you’re not going to do it,” said Dr. David Michaels, head of OSHA from 2009 to January 2017 and now a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health.
“OSHA will continue to prioritize the longer-term rulemaking on infectious diseases within its overall regulatory program,” a Department of Labor spokesperson said. The agency has also created a coronavirus safety page on its website[3] and is “continuing to monitor this quickly evolving situation and will take the necessary steps to protect workers from 2019-nCoV as appropriate and in coordination with the overall U.S. government response effort,” the spokesperson said.
The World Health Organization has said that protecting health-care workers must be a top priority in confronting the coronavirus. “If we don’t protect the first-line health-care workers, it will be very difficult to control the epidemic or treat people affected by it,” Michaels said. The importance of appropriate safety protocols was underscored this week as a report emerged that Department of Health and Human Services workers interacted with people quarantined for possible coronavirus exposure[4] without proper equipment or training.
Even before the coronavirus outbreak, some lawmakers expressed concern that OSHA was not prioritizing the infectious-disease standard. At a House Education and Labor Committee hearing in May 2019, Rep. Bobby Scott, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the committee, said OSHA was “relegating to the back burner standards to protect health-care workers from exposure to infectious diseases such as Ebola, pandemic flu and MRSA.”
OSHA’s draft infectious-diseases standard was developed partly in response to the H1N1 flu pandemic[5] in 2009.
As coronavirus concerns grew in January, Scott and Rep. Alma Adams, a Democrat from North Carolina who chairs the subcommittee on workforce protections, wrote Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia urging action on the infectious-diseases standard. The lawmakers were “very concerned that OSHA’s Infectious Diseases standard continues...