COVID-19 Pandemic and Respiratory Protection: An Examination of US Workers’ Compensation Claim Data from 2018 - 2022
Academic Article
Overview
Overview
Abstract
Background and Objectives. Respiratory protection (RP) plays a critical role in reducing or eliminating exposure to inhalation hazards in the workplace. In the US, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires employers to ensure that workers are protected from such hazards. Although the effectiveness of RP has been established, compliance with OSHA regulations is not complete. With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, RP compliance among workers may have improved. While we cannot directly test RP compliance, we investigate trends immediately before and after the start of the pandemic to identify whether pandemic mitigation efforts had a spillover effect of enhancing RP at workplaces. Methods. We study exposure rates to certain inhalation risk factors arising from work activity that are amenable to RP. For this, we use 2018-2022 data from a large national workers’ compensation medical bill review administrator’s processing system in the US that includes detailed ICD-10 diagnosis codes submitted by healthcare providers. We focus on the incidence of exposure to specific chemical, biological, and bio-infectious agents as well as to parasitic diseases at work that can potentially be alleviated by basic RP. Results. In line with our expectations, incidence of certain conditions that are amenable to RP in workers compensation claims, e.g. respiratory diseases, have dropped in the first years of the pandemic. We study trends by various characteristics such as sex, age, and urban vs rural geographies. As a falsification test, we find no downward trends in the incidence of skin diseases which are not amenable to RP. Conclusions. We conjecture that the expanded use of RP to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic may have had a beneficial spillover effect of protecting against inhalation hazards at work. This experience can provide insights for improving compliance with RP in workplaces, especially in health care settings.
