Oregon’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, is proposing to make the mask mandate for workers in Oregon permanent — temporarily.

Wait, before you scream, let’s be clear. OSHA does not want to make it permanent. By law, though, OSHA can’t extend a temporary rule more than 180 days. The rule was adopted in November 2020 and it is set to expire on May 4, 2021. To be able to extend the mask-mandate protection for workers for COVID-19, OSHA has to put into place a permanent rule.

The intent, OSHA stresses, is not to permanently require masks in the workplace in Oregon. It’s just that temporary rules can’t be extended. So OSHA is going to put in place a permanent rule and intends to repeal it when it is no longer necessary.

Masks work in helping to reduce the spread of COVID-19. And even though more and more people are getting vaccinated, there’s still a need to keep our guard up. If you want, more information about what OSHA is doing, the place where the information is easiest to digest is on Oregon OSHA’s Facebook page. More technical information is available at tinyurl.com/maskpermanent.