With states reopening, shoppers are returning to malls and stores, prompting public health officials to point to rebounding coronavirus cases in some regions. Yet despite the continued risk, there is no system in place for tracking whether these establishments have been involved in an outbreak.
With states around the country reopening, shoppers are returning to malls and visiting stores again, prompting worried public health officials to point to rebounding cases of infections in some regions. Yet despite the continued risk of the coronavirus, there is no system in place for tracking whether these establishments have been involved in an outbreak, according to experts who follow worker safety and a survey done by Yahoo News.
OSHA has come under criticism in the past for its failure to provide oversight, and critics say those problems have gotten worse under Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia, who came into office under President Trump. Scalia has a history of voting against proposed worker assistance programs, and OSHA was criticized in May by AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka for being “missing in action” and “failing to meet their obligation and duty to protect workers.
None of those companies, including the three that said they informed employees, would say whether they made any effort to disclose the infections publicly, potentially leaving customers in the dark. TJX, the parent company of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods, did not respond to whether it informs employees about coronavirus cases in its stores, but it said it has established a process to support the health and wellness of its associates and customers and that it is cooperating with local health department guidelines.
OSHA does require employers to record injuries and fatalities in the workplace, and those logs are also available to unions and workers and are intended to be made public on OSHA’s website. But the logs don’t provide real-time data collection because they are typically annual reports. One of the primary difficulties in tracking cases is that it is nearly impossible to determine if someone contracted COVID-19 from work — and only work-related cases are required to be recorded by OSHA.
These requirements encourage more effort to be put into investigating outbreaks, but they still limit recording to illnesses that were acquired at work. In the absence of that sort of database, it’s up to employers to inform employees of infection, and bolstered privacy protections prevent them from sharing the name of the infected person, making it more difficult for co-workers to know if they have had contact.
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