The revised rules come from the California Division of Safety and Health — also known as Cal/OSHA — which regulates health and safety in California workplaces.
Changes include:
Testing: If there’s an outbreak at work, employers need to make FDA-approved COVID tests available to exposed employees at no cost, during paid time — and now that also goes for vaccinated, asymptomatic workers who were exposed.
Tests can no longer be self-administered and self-read. In other words, workers can’t take a test at home by themselves. Tests that are processed by a lab, or observed by a medical professional during a telehealth appointment, or administered and observed by medical professionals or an employer are still okay.
Who gets sent home after exposure:
Previously, if a fully vaccinated person had close contact with a COVID-positive person, but didn’t develop symptoms, they didn’t need to be sent home from work. Under rules passed by Cal/OSHA on Dec. 15, vaccinated asymptomatic people would have needed to be sent home from work unless they wore a mask and maintained 6 feet of distance from others for two weeks.
However, before that revised rule went into effect, the California Department of Public health issued guidance on Jan 6. that overrode rules on isolation and quarantine. Those rules are different and more specific to the kind of worker exposed.
Updating what counts as a mask: If workers choose to wear a fabric mask, rather than a surgical or medical one, the new rules clarify that it needs to be sufficiently thick and tightly woven to not let light pass through it when held up to a light source.
The rules also require employers to ensure workers wear masks as required by California’s public health department. On Dec. 15, a new statewide mask mandate that includes workplaces went into effect, and it’s slated to remain in place until Feb. 15. Workers need to wear masks indoors, but if a worker is alone in a room with a closed door, or if the workplace is a single person operation, masks aren’t needed.
Now, vaccinated asymptomatic people need to be sent home from work unless they wear a mask and maintain 6 feet of distance from others for two weeks.
If someone gets exposed to COVID at work, state law requires that employers send them home and maintain their usual pay until they meet the return to work criteria set forth by the California Department of Public Health.
However, employers aren’t currently required to offer additional sick leave for COVID as a general policy. A state law requiring employers with 25 or more workers to offer up to 80 hours of supplemental paid leave for COVID expired in September leaving workers legally entitled to just three days of sick leave annually.
Federal guidelines recommend that anyone who tests positive for the virus quarantine for five days.
Some legislators are pushing to bring back supplemental COVID sick leave in 2022, and the governor said working on sick leave was a “top priority” for him when he rolled out his budget proposal in early January.