Co-authored by Connor Michael, Staff Writer, Laboratory Safety Institute
“The way organizations respond to the pandemic shows what they’re made of,” says Raj Santhappa, M.D., president of the Laboratory Safety Institute. “Rather than just following COVID safety protocols as required and waiting for things to return to normal, successful organizations saw it as an opportunity to show that they value the health and safety of their employees, and when people feel valued and cared for, organizations are stronger.”
In this article, the Laboratory Safety Institute reflects on the positive lessons learned from COVID-19, and how organizations can emerge stronger and safer on the other side of the pandemic.
The science of safety took a huge leap forward
When the pandemic hit, labs everywhere dropped everything else to focus on the virus. While some areas of study unfortunately suffered, the massive infusion of resources into epidemiology, virology and related disciplines fueled research that redefined those fields. At the same time, unprecedented scientific collaboration catalyzed the cross-pollination of ideas, shifting the paper churn into overdrive. Meanwhile, social scientists capitalized on new opportunities for large-scale natural studies of human behavior and public health compliance.
The majority of this new knowledge found direct application in laboratory safety. Real-world data broadened and deepened our understanding of eye and face protection, ventilation, disinfection and other safety topics. Principles gleaned from new research in behavioral science also helped labs find effective ways to motivate safety compliance.
Digital learning exploded
COVID-19 sent teachers everywhere scrambling to get their classes online in an incredibly short amount of time. Science educators especially faced the difficult challenge of re-creating the hands-on experience of a lab on a screen. With some ingenuity and compromise, most teachers found a way to make it work, thanks in part to the many digital resources, including lab simulations, that educational providers made available for free at the start of the pandemic. After the initial panic wore off, educators began to think seriously about using the new remote instruction methods over the long term.
“Chaos and craziness do feed into innovation,” said Candace Wicks, Ph.D., associate professor of biology at Hardin-Simmons University.
“Some of the resources that we were able to access in the spring [of 2020], moving forward we think these are good things to integrate into our classes anyway,” she said in a panel discussion hosted by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.1
Research labs also saw a long-term benefit of pandemic-era innovations.
“Most PIs agree that hybrid working is here to stay in some guise. The flexibility for everyone to be included online, no matter their circumstances, far outweighs the problems of having to deal with technical glitches,’” notes the article “How Hybrid Working Took Hold in Science” in Nature.2
We got a lesson in risk management
When the pandemic began, people were talking about “flattening the curve.” Then they settled for “trying to blunt the peak of the curves.” After the third, fourth and fifth peaks, many people began to accept the reality that we may be in the mountains for a while. Living through those ups and downs taught us all an important lesson about risk management, says University of Tennessee Chief Safety Officer Timothy Barton.
“COVID taught us the importance of maintaining a high standard of safety at all times, not just when you feel an increased sense of danger,” he says. “At the same time, we all had to realize that risks are part of life. Staying safe doesn’t mean hiding in a cave. You just find safer ways of doing the same things.”
Santhappa says that most organizations that the Laboratory Safety Institute works with fall somewhere on a spectrum from having no safety program at all to embracing safety as a core value. On the low end of the spectrum, labs tend to repeat a cycle of reacting to accidents but failing to make systemic changes, followed by more accidents. Labs with more developed safety programs “integrate safer practices into their business routines and keep going,” he says.
There was a similar spectrum of reactions when the pandemic hit, he says. Hoping that the restrictions would be only temporary, some organizations only did the minimum to comply with government regulations, but organizations with highly developed safety programs wrote more rigorous safety routines into their standard operating procedures and kept going.
We saw what a good safety program can accomplish
Increasing awareness of safety in everyday life is the first step in building an organizational culture of safety, says Jim Kaufman, Ph.D., founder of the Laboratory Safety Institute.
“In 45 years of teaching safety to all sorts of labs in industry and academia, I have tried to stress that safety needs to be part of your life, not just part of your job. In a way, COVID taught that lesson to millions of people in a matter of months,” Kaufman said.
As COVID-19 disrupted nearly every aspect of our lives, it also raised the profile of safety as never before. People stopped spelling out “personal protective equipment” as “PPE” became a household term just weeks into the pandemic. Hand-washing and disinfection routines that previously didn’t exist became automatic. Virus risk assessment apps multiplied, and celebrities even posted selfies showing off their designer masks.
It took decades for societal norms to budge on other issues such as secondhand smoke or seat belts, but when the pandemic hit, people adopted new, safer behaviors in a blink. Seven months into the pandemic, National Geographic reported: “Despite some noisy no-mask protests, 92 percent of 2,200 Americans polled say they wear a face mask when leaving their home, with 74 percent saying they ‘always’ do.”3
Public health measures such as masking and physical distancing drastically reduced case counts and death rates, not only for COVID-19, but for other infectious diseases as well. Overall, U.S. deaths from the flu dropped from tens of thousands to hundreds during the 2020-2021 flu season, and pediatric flu deaths dropped from 200 to 1.4
“COVID showed us how small, simple safety improvements can accomplish great things,” Kaufman says, adding that many organizations that he has seen started with no safety program—even a disdain for safety—but over time, incremental changes add up.
“You just have to keep hammering away,” he says, referencing 19th-century social reformer Jacob Riis: “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”5
References
1. Samek, L., Bradley, A., Reese, C., Wicks, C., Williams, T. Panel Discussion. Online, August 2020. https://www.cccu.org/magazine/explosion-online-learning/.
2. Powell, Kendall. “How Hybrid Working Took Hold in Science.” Nature, vol. 603, 17 Mar. 2022, pp. 537-539. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00729-9.
3. Whang, Oliver and Elliott, Kennedy. “Poll Finds More Americans than Ever Think We Should Wear Masks.” National Geographic, 3 May 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/poll-increasing-bipartisan-majority-americans-support-mask-wearing.
4. Iati, Marisa. “The Flu Killed Nearly 200 Children Last Season. This Time, 1 Has Died.” Washington Post, 2 Mar. 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/02/children-flu-deaths/.
5. https://www.quotes.net/quote/16935
About the Expert: Jim Kaufman, PhD, is a member of Labcompare's Editorial Advisory Board and Founder/President Emeritus of the Laboratory Safety Institute (LSI)– an international, non-profit center for safety in science, industry, and education. He received his BA in chemistry from Tufts and his PhD in organic chemistry from WPI. Kaufman has educated more than 100,000 scientists and science educators in over 135 types of labs in 34 countries. Working for Dow, he authored "Laboratory Safety Guidelines." Over six million copies (in 23 languages) are in circulation. He was a 10-year member of the ACS Council Committee on Chemical Safety and is past-chair of the ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety.