Department of Labor terminates COVID-19 health care ruling

What does it mean for dentists?

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced it has terminated its COVID-19 infection control rulemaking for health care personnel. 

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration said in a news release that the termination will allow the agency to focus its resources on the completion of a more comprehensive infectious disease standard for health care rather than a disease-specific standard. 

“[The agency] is now terminating the rulemaking via this rule because the public health emergency is over and any ongoing risk by COVID-19 or other coronavirus hazards faced by health care workers would be better addressed at this time in a rulemaking addressing infectious diseases more broadly,” reads the news release. 

According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, there are several steps health care employers, including dentists, can take to mitigate and prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the workplace. Some of these guidelines include conducting training and implementing multi-layered interventions to mitigate the spread of viruses and diseases. 

Employers are also encouraged to assess the hazards to which their workers may be exposed and evaluate the risk of exposure, as well as implement controls to prevent exposure risk based on occupational tasks. Appropriate steps in the workplace include a multi-layered approach to protecting staff, according to the agency. This includes vaccination, testing for COVID-19, engineering controls for ventilation, personal protective equipment, physical distancing and enhanced cleaning programs with a focus on high-touch surfaces. 

The agency issued an emergency temporary standard in 2021 to protect workers in health care settings, finding that COVID-19 presented a grave danger to those workers at that time. According to the rulemaking, nearly half a million health care workers had contracted COVID-19 virus and more than 1,600 of those workers had died. 

In 2022, the ADA sent a letter to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration when it was considering modifying the emergency temporary standard and potentially removing some of the exemptions for ambulatory care facilities, including most dental offices. The ADA emphasized there is no grave danger or a significant risk to health care workers of contracting COVID-19 in dental settings. 

“Infection rates among dentists and dental teams are very low — far lower than for other health care workers, such as nurses and physicians, and even lower than in the general population,” reads the ADA letter, which said as of June 2021 at least 89.8% of dentists had been fully vaccinated. 

The 2022 letter added that the ADA “strongly supports” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations for health care workers to vaccinate against COVID-19, including dental team members. 

Former President Joe Biden signed into law House Joint Resolution 7 in April 2023, terminating the national emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which works to assure safe working conditions by setting and enforcing standards and by providing training and education assistance, said it always intended for an infectious diseases standard for health care workers to supplant any COVID-19 health care standard.