Additional hygiene and biosafety measures as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in Peruvian industry

Abstract

The high risk of contagion and affectation by COVID-19 in industrial workers made it necessary to rethink the hygiene and biosafety protocols already established, with measures such as distancing from jobs, staggering entry and exit times, controls temperature, the supervised use of Individual Protection Elements (PPE's) and epidemiological surveillance on personnel, among others. In this research, the ERBioCov instrument is proposed and validated, which aims to assess the proportion in the implementation of new and traditional hygiene and biosafety protocols, which was applied in industries in Lima, Peru in two periods of 2020 and 2021. According to the values obtained, 80.5% of hygiene and biosafety measures are currently applied by the industries studied in Peru, in contrast to the 68.9% obtained in the initial months of the pandemic in 2020, difference for which a high statistical significance was verified (p=3,93E-06; t -5.887). Among them, the traditional measures had a greater increase in their application between both periods studied, reaching from 65.6% to 80.8% (p=0; t=-6.544) compared to the additional measures, which remained at the range of 78.4% and 79.6% in 2020 and 2021, respectively (p=0.7442; t=-0.326). Likewise, a high rate of prevention against biological risks was obtained, quantified in 28 measures applied in a range of 93% to 100% of the participating industries.