Yahoo! News Seeks Insight from Steve Parascandola on New OSHA Requirements for Companies to Report COVID-19 Cases to Employees and Public

In the Yahoo! News article, “As businesses reopen and shoppers return, coronavirus is rebounding, but government isn't tracking retail-based outbreaks,” Steve Parascandola, one of North Carolina's leading environmental, health and safety lawyers, provided insight on the new Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) requirements for COVID-19 cases. Steve is featured alongside workplace safety government officials; the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union; spokespersons from retail giants Amazon, Target, and TJX; and other industry experts. 

Also reported in the article are findings from a Yahoo! News survey of the top 20 U.S. retailers about their policies for reporting cases to the government and informing employees and the public about known cases.

“OSHA realized that for non-high-risk employers, it was going to be difficult to figure out if [a COVID-19 case] was work-related. So they recognized to the public that this is difficult to do and wanted people to focus on PPE instead,” said Steve. “Work-related determinations are fairly obvious in most situations, but causation for coronavirus, even beyond OSHA, is going to be an extremely difficult thing to prove, at least in the short term.”

When asked about the increased privacy protections related to employers informing employees of infection, Steve replied, “I can’t stress enough, privacy laws have greatly expanded to the point where now they are maybe butting up against contact tracing efforts.”

Read the full article here.

Yahoo! News is a news website that originated as an internet-based news aggregator by Yahoo!. Articles originally came from news services such as the Associated Press, Reuters, Fox News, Al Jazeera, ABC News, USA Today, CNN and BBC News.