Employees’ Briefing: What You Need to Know about Coronavirus

The coronavirus, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared as a global public health emergency, has now made its way to Canada. And that means some of your employees may be exposed, especially if they work in health care or jobs that involve world travel or contact with people who’ve been in Wuhan China from where the coronavirus originated or other countries where cases have occurred. As with other hazards, you have an OHS duty to ensure employees exposed or potentially exposed to coronavirus receive appropriate notification and education about the virus. The problem is that because coronavirus is so new, we don’t know much about it at this point. Accordingly, the go-to source for information are governments and global health agencies like the WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Here’s a CDC factsheet on coronavirus that you should distribute to your own employees.