Tag Archives: ventilation

U.S. Labor Department issues emergency COVID-19 rule for healthcare workers

By Tom Hals

(Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Labor issued an emergency rule on Thursday for controlling COVID-19 and protecting workers in healthcare settings, but stopped short of extending the rule to other high-risk industries.

Hospitals, nursing homes and other health facilities will be required within 14 days to implement the rule that covers face masks, ventilation and requirements for screening and limiting patients and visitors.

The rule by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) aligns with existing non-binding guidance from the agency, but gives workers greater leverage to demand protections and provides for stricter enforcement and fines.

The agency will issue further non-binding guidance for unvaccinated workers in high-risk industries later on Thursday.

Labor unions and workplace safety advocates have pushed for the emergency temporary standard since the start of the pandemic and wanted the rules to apply to meatpacking, transport and other sectors that suffered clusters of severe COVID-19 outbreaks.

“We believe we are targeting and focusing on workers at the highest risk,” Jim Frederick, the acting director of OSHA, told Reuters.

He said OSHA is adding inspectors and will provide other high-risk sectors with education, training and assistance in complying with non-binding guidance.

With the pandemic receding, business groups could challenge the healthcare rule by arguing it should have been adopted through a slower rule-making process with public comment, rather than the emergency process used when there is a “grave danger.”

Under the Trump Administration, OSHA focused on issuing non-binding guidance which the agency said allowed for greater flexibility during a rapidly changing outbreak.

On Wednesday, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh was criticized at a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives by Republican lawmakers who disagreed with the need for an emergency rule.

“Let’s let people go back to work in a normal fashion,” said Rep. Tim Walberg, a Republican from Michigan.

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Additional reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Bill Berkrot)

Scientists spray saliva-like droplets in stadium to study how fans spread aerosols

By Bart H. Meijer

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Scientists are using the Netherlands’ largest football stadium to model how a cheering football crowd might spread aerosols through the air by spraying fine droplets, made to resemble saliva, over the empty stands.

Their hope is that by finding out more about the behavior of aerosols or airborne particles, which could spread the coronavirus within a crowd, they will be able to remove them from the air and get fans back into stadiums and concert halls.

“There is almost no information in scientific literature about the behavior of aerosols in this kind of environment”, lead researcher Bert Blocken told Reuters.

The tests are taking place at the Johan Cruyff Arena in Amsterdam, home of Ajax Amsterdam.

“We want to get a fundamental insight in the behavior of aerosols in a stadium filled with football supporters. By air cleaning technologies you can drastically reduce concentrations and make stadiums safe in terms of aerosol transmission of the virus,” he added.

There is growing consensus among scientists that transmission via aerosols plays a part in the spread of the novel coronavirus, although it is unclear to what extent.

The research could provide insight in how to minimize the concentration of aerosols and limit their epidemic risk, said Blocken, a professor in aerodynamics at the Technical University of Eindhoven.

A computer model will extrapolate the data gathered during weeks of testing to show the effects for a full capacity crowd of around 55,000.

Researchers also hope to get permission soon to experiment with a real crowd of 730 football fans, seated close together.

The final goal is to get capacity crowds back into stadiums, Blocken said, possibly through the use of large scale COVID-19 testing, face masks and ventilation.

That would be exactly what the Johan Cruyff Arena needs to survive, its director told Reuters.

“This is a very costly building, and the income is less than half of what is normal, so we are making a loss every month”, said Henk Markerink.

“We try to keep the ship afloat, but this shouldn’t take too long because in the end this cannot be financed.”