OSHA Terminates COVID-19 Rulemaking and Works on Standard Addressing a Broader Range of Infectious Diseases
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has abandoned efforts to establish a final COVID-19 safety standard to ensure workers in healthcare settings are protected from COVID-19.
OSHA issued an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) on June 21, 2021, after determining that COVID-19 posed a grave danger to healthcare workers. At that point, almost half a million healthcare workers had contracted COVID-19, and more than 1,600 healthcare workers had died as a result of COVID-19 infections. After issuing the ETS, OSHA received petitions from industry associations including the American Nurses Association, International Association of Fire Chiefs, and National Nurses United (NNU) urging OSHA to adopt a permanent standard to protect healthcare workers from COVID-19 and to also issue a separate standard covering a broader range of infectious diseases.
OSHA submitted a draft final COVID-19 rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget on December 7, 2022; however, on April 10, 2023, House Joint Resolution 7 was signed into law by President Biden terminating the COVID-19 public health emergency. Now that the COVID-19 public health emergency is over, OSHA feels that any ongoing risk to healthcare workers from COVID-19 and other coronavirus hazards would be best addressed through further rulemaking addressing infectious diseases more broadly, and has been working on the development of an infectious diseases standard for healthcare workers.
If OSHA had continued to focus on a separate COVID-19 standard, it would have consumed a considerable amount of agency staff time and other resources, which would have inhibited the promulgation of a broader protective infection disease standard. OSHA believes that focusing its resources on the development of a standard that provides protections for healthcare workers from a much broader range of infectious diseases will have a much greater impact on the safety and health of healthcare workers than spreading its resources thinly by working on separate standards for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, hence the termination of COVID-19 rulemaking.
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