The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has initiated a three-month inspection blitz of hospitals and long-term care facilities that handle COVID-19 patients to ensure that they have corrected prior violations as a way to prepare for a future surge of the virus.
The agency will begin the “short-term increase in highly focused inspections directed at hospitals and skilled nursing care facilities” starting on Wednesday through June 9. The Labor Department agency’s undertaking signals that the United States is entering a new phase of the pandemic in which COVID-19 is not a daily health crisis but rather a normal facet of life that must be tolerated like any other disease risk, such as seasonal flu.
“As the nation moves to the next phase of the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Labor recognizes the need to prepare for any new variants that may emerge and provide healthcare workers the protections they deserve,” OSHA said in a statement earlier this week.
Agency officials outlined to regional staff in a memo last week what inspectors will be looking for, including evidence that past violations have been corrected or are in the process of being corrected. Healthcare facilities will need to show inspectors their emergency preparedness plan in the event that a new variant causes patient populations to swell, as previous variants have done. Employees will also have to provide worker illness logs and personal protective equipment inventory, as well as to demonstrate to inspectors that they know how to use PPE such as respirators properly.
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“Through this focused enforcement initiative, the agency will verify and assess hospital and skilled nursing care employers’ compliance actions taken, including their readiness to address any ongoing or future COVID-19 surges,” the agency said.
Inspectors will also take note of facilities’ vaccination rates and report any failures to vaccinate staff to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has jurisdiction over the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for workers whose employers receive funding from the government healthcare program.
OSHA Assistant Secretary of Labor Doug Parker said the new round of targeted inspections was a precursor to a permanent standard on protecting workings from infectious disease.
“We want to be ahead of any future events in healthcare,” Parker said.
All 50 states and Washington, D.C., have at least made plans to lift their mask mandates in public settings, with Hawaii being the last to do so. The states that had yet to relax their masking rules were led by Democrats, who have been more reluctant than Republicans counterparts to let COVID-19 safety measures expire. Democratic governors spurned such mandates while and before the omicron variant occurred late last year.
Republicans in Congress have taken steps in recent weeks to declare the emergency over. They successfully passed a resolution last week to end the national state of emergency declaration from 2020 to confront the rising threat of COVID-19. The national emergency designation is powered by a law known as the National Emergencies Act, which grants the president expanded authority to deal with crises other than natural disasters and war. They also passed a resolution to nix the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers whose employers receive funding from Medicare and Medicaid.
Neither is expected to go to President Joe Biden’s desk for a signature because each would require passage in the House, a tall order given the Democratic majority.
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The surge caused late last year by the omicron variant has been snuffed out with new daily case counts at their lowest levels since July 2021, New York Times tracking shows. The omicron variant caused staggering case increases and hospitalizations that threatened to topple the healthcare system.
Hospitalizations continued to wane in the U.S., having fallen from their peak of nearly 160,000 patients being treated at once down to about 37,000. Deaths, which often lag a couple of weeks behind hospitalizations, have also maintained a downward trajectory since the omicron peak in early February when an average of roughly 2,700 people were dying with COVID-19 every day for a week.
