Employers all over the world, and certainly here in the United States, are trying to find ways to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 infections at work so their companies can stay open and productive while their people stay safe and healthy.

In this article, we’re going to present 10 key safety considerations for reducing the risks of COVID-19 spreading at your workplace.

Before we begin, please know that we’ve got a COVID Return to Work Checklist for you and our parent company Vector Solutions has created free online COVID-19 Safety Training courses you’re welcome to use as well.

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As you may already know, on January 29, 2021, OSHA released a new guidance related to workplace safety and health and COVID-19 mitigation strategies: ‘Protecting Workers: Guidance on Mitigating and Preventing the Spread of COVID-19 in the Workplace.’

We provided a full walk-through of that new OSHA guidance in an earlier blog post, but in this blog post we wanted to drill down and focus on other OSHA standards and safety/health regulations that you’ll need to keep in mind regarding your COVID prevention plan in addition to the actual OSHA guidance.

And before we get going, we wanted to make sure you know about the COVID Return to Work Checklist we’ve got for you and the online COVID-19 Safety Training courses our parent company Vector Solutions is making available to everyone as well. We hope you find the checklist and the online courses helpful.

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Shortly after the presidential inauguration in 2021, OSHA released a new guidance related to workplace safety and health and COVID-19 mitigation strategies: ‘Protecting Workers: Guidance on Mitigating and Preventing the Spread of COVID-19 in the Workplace.’ In addition to this new guidance, OSHA has also created a lengthy list of industry-specific guidances to help with COVID mitigation too.

In this article, we’re going to introduce you to the key points of this new OSHA guidance regarding COVID mitigation and a COVID prevention plan. We’ll also let you know about a few resources we’ve created to help you with COVID-safety at your workplace, discuss an earlier, 2020 Return to Work guidance from OSHA, and link to you helpful resources from other organizations like the CDC, NIH, AIHA, and ASSP that you can refer to in order to strengthen your COVID ‘return to work’ safety and health efforts.

We’ll quickly begin by linking you to the COVID Return to Work Checklist we have created and the online COVID-19 Safety Training courses our parent company Vector Solutions has made available to everyone as part of their ‘Vector Cares’ initiative.

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Back on January 29, 2021, OSHA released a new guidance called ‘Protecting Workers: Guidance on Mitigating and Preventing the Spread of COVID-19 in the Workplace.’ As we generally do when writing about things like OSHA guidances, we encourage you to read the whole guidance on your own in addition to reading this article that draws on part of the guidance. And keep in mind that, in addition to this general guidance, OSHA has also created quite a few industry-specific guidances to help with COVID mitigation as well.

We’ll walk you through the key points of the guidance and zero in on OSHA’s recommendations for COVID-19 related safety and health training in this article.

But before you start reading, you might want to download this COVID-19 Return to Work Checklist we created for you–it’s based on the OSHA COVID guidance we’re referring to in this article. Also, we’ve got a series of completely free COVID-19 online training courses offered through our parent company Vector Solutions as part of their ‘Vector Cares’ program. Be sure to check those out and put them to use.

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As you may know, the American Industrial Hygienists Association (AIHA) has released a Focus Four for Construction Health guidance document that identifies four significant health hazards in construction, explains the hazards in detail, gives control recommendations, and more. We recently discussed the health guidance document with Barb Epstein, one of the creators of the AIHA construction health hazards document, and wrote about the four construction health hazards as well.

Having introduced people to the AIHA Focus Four document and those four construction health hazards in general, we wanted to follow-up by taking a deep-dive, looking at each of the four health hazards in more detail in separate articles. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at manual material handling (the other health hazards are air contaminants, noise, and high temperatures, and we’ll take closer looks at each in later articles).

We hope this article helps keep workers at your construction sites safe and, in addition to this article, we encourage you to download any of the following:

• Guide to OSHA Construction Compliance
• Construction Safety Training Guide 
• Construction & Silica Infographic 
• Getting Started with Construction Safety Management Infographic 
• Seven Elements of Construction Safety Management Infographic 

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COVID’s been a major challenge for employers and employees in every industry and, frankly, for everyone in the world. And there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, as we’ve got some effective vaccines and we’re starting to get shots into arms out there (well done, healthcare workers, and thanks!). But that said, we’re still a long way from being out of the woods on this one.

Every industry has had to grapple with ways that are common from industry-to-industry. For example, it’s good for all of us to main social/physical distance, to wash our hands, and to wear masks to reduce the spread of the virus. You can learn more about a lot of this stuff that applies in all walks of life and from industry-to-industry in the series of free COVID awareness videos Vector Solutions has made available, and we’d recommend you check out OSHA’s January 29, 2021 COVID guidance as well.

But it’s also true that each industry has its own unique COVID-related health challenges, risks, and controls. And that’s true of the construction industry. Thankfully, the American Industrial Hygienist Association, or AIHA, has published a guidance document called Returning to Work: Construction Industry to help construction employers and workers in their efforts to work safely and preserve their health within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We’ll provide a brief overview and some tips we gleaned from the document, but we encourage you to download it, read and apply it yourself, and to keep in mind that OSHA COVID guidance and materials from trusted sources such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as well.

Also, because we all know that COVID is creating an extreme strain on our mental health as well as our physical help, feel free to check out these two recorded discussions with some industry experts addressing issues related to the construction industry, COVID, mental health, and suicide: Cal Beyer discussing suicide and mental health in construction and other high-risk industries and Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas discussing the National Guidelines for Suicide Prevention (both in general and in the context of the current COVID pandemic).

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