The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) November 4 issued an emergency temporary standard (ETS) requiring employers with 100 or more employees to implement a program of COVID-19 vaccination or regular testing and face coverings to protect unvaccinated workers but not requiring employers to pay for testing.

The agency’s June 21 COVID-19 ETS only applies to healthcare facilities and healthcare support services where employees may be exposed to COVID-19. Under the ETS, healthcare facilities must conduct a hazard assessment and develop a written plan to mitigate virus spread through methods such as erecting barriers and implementing control measures to maintain 6 feet of distancing between employees at entry points and nursing stations, as well as control staff and patient access to quarantine zones.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra signed another order October 15 extending the national public health emergency (PHE) related to the COVID-19 pandemic for another 90 days. The order is effective October 18 and lasts through January 16, 2022, unless it is rescinded earlier.

Daniel McQuillen, MD, took on the leading role at the IDSA last week. In addition to serving as president of the IDSA, he is a senior physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Beth Israel Lahey Health and Lahey Hospital & Medical Center, and an assistant professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.

Writing in JAMA, University of California at Los Angeles researchers looked at COVID-19 cases and deaths among U.S. federal and state prisoners for 52 weeks from April 5, 2020, to April 3, 2021 and compared these rates with the overall U.S. population.

The NCSBN and eight other leading nursing organizations, including the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL) and the American Nurses Association (ANA), issued a policy brief to provide guidance to boards of nursing and nursing education programs receiving requests from students for alternate clinical experiences when a program’s clinical sites require the COVID-19 vaccine.

The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses has launched Hear Us Out, a nationwide effort to show the COVID-19 pandemic from frontline nurses’ perspective and urge those who have yet to be vaccinated to reconsider.

Nurses still face problems with access to testing, being notified in a timely manner when they are exposed, inadequate respiratory protection, unsafe staffing, mental health, and workplace violence, the survey reveals. Compared to results from the last survey in March 2021, RNs also reported inadequate COVID screening and testing rates for patients who enter or are admitted to a healthcare facility and a decrease in dedicated COVID units.

The COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed more than 660,000 lives in the U.S. has also cut aggregate life expectancy here by more than 9 million years, according to a study published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. The study authors said their findings suggest that the mortality burden of COVID-19 is more substantial than previously thought.