So have the measures that the USA (Federal, State, and Local governments) caused more harm than good? That seems to be the debate at this stage in this pandemic. So as a profession we have been conditioned (hopefully this is changing) that the OSHA rates are a measure of safety performance. I think anyone working at a factory with 100+ people has heard of the OSHA rate – heck a lot of them know it because they are rewarded based on it!!! But imagine if your plant manager came to you and said… “I have been looking at our numbers and the trend is concerning”. You take a look at the graph and this is what you see on March 12th… the illnesses doubled from March 10th. Your boss asks you “What are we going to do?”
You think for a minute and realize you have nothing in your traditional safety program that can effectively manage the spread of this illness and realize that if you did nothing eventually everyone may become ill and then what would that do to the business. It is hard to look at the data and KNOW that this is most likely UNDER REPORTED due to the lack of testing ability.
Look at that trend line and honestly tell me that from 3/14 to 4/6, where we went from 338 cases to 43,438 new cases per day, you would not be concerned. Throw in the fact that we had NOTHING in our toolbox to slow the spread.
Can we trust the data? We keep hearing the idea that the numbers are inflated for financial gain, political gain, etc. etc. If our medical profession is this easily corrupted then why even bother with medical care. Hell let’s go back to pre-revolutionary war days and we can save billions of $ on health care. After all, those who subscribe to the “numbers are inflated” theory is basically saying our doctors are whores to the $ and if you believe this then why would you go see them once a year or when your ill? They’re just in it for the $ – bought off by big pharma. Are there some doctors who would meet this description? Absolutely, but I am banking on them being few! There are these two doctors who have become social media darlings who claimed they had been pressured to classify deaths as COVID19, until someone realized they were owners of an Urgent Care facility in California and they had not yet even seen a case of COVID 19 much less had to classify a death as such. But that does not stop the masses from sharing their videos all over social media.
The data depicted above is the data we have to use, much like our OSHA 300 logs. Ever found a 300 log that had some discrepancies? Do we then throw out all of the data from our past and just bury our heads in the sand and say “All is OK”?
I think most of us see that trend line and think… DANG this is bad, we need to take action NOW and it needs to be swift. But our traditional safety program does not really have the answers – heck this virus is even different than our BBP/Exposure Control Plan as it is transmitted person to person without physical contact with bodily fluids. So what is your suggestion to management to correct this trend?
Require everyone to wear a N95? That would help immensely and may even reverse the trend quickly. But in order for that PPE measure to work we would need to medically evaluate ALL employees, fittest all employees, train all employees, as the use of the N95 has now become mandatory. Then we would have to ensure we had enough masks for everyone over the time period these measures would be in place.
But I skipped over one of the more important concerns we should ALL have… we went straight to PPE as our protection method! What about engineering controls and administrative controls? Could these controls be used BEFORE or in conjunction with the N95’s? Something like “distancing” since we know the virus is most likely to travel through the air to contaminate. Or lessening the number of people in a group to lessen the risk that you would be exposed to an infected person? Or have employees do ONLY those tasks that are critical and force them to be in contact with others?
These isolation practices have been in place in occupational safety for decades. Just ask anyone who has managed a safety program with a “regulated area” like 1910.1018 Inorganic arsenic. We don’t just let the sick people go into the area, we control the area as we know that is where the hazard is located. Doing this in society is quite a bit more difficult than in the workplace, but what else was there to do?
Testing? We hear a lot about “testing” and we should do more. You get tested today and you’re not infected… you go to work and your now infected within hours of being told you were not infected. You’re asymptomatic so you do not change your behaviors, except to maybe lessen your diligence to the distancing and hand washing. What did the test do for us as a society? Imagine having a room of 20 people, 19 have been tested and their results are negative. The one person who is infected has not been tested. You have a meeting and the single person just infected 19 people who think they are NOT infected based on their test results. They then go home and guess who they infect, then their kids go to school the next day and guess what… this is the challenge with a transmittable virus for which there is no vaccine or cure.
