The COVID Project
The record
- Jurisdiction
- South Carolina
- Level
- State
- Authority
- DHEC, Interim Guidance for COVID-19 Scenarios in Businesses (July 25, 2020)
- Issued
- 2020-07-25 July 25, 2020
- Effective
- 2020-07-25 (superseding earlier versions; the DHEC Businesses & Employers page listed it as 'UPDATED') (read as 2020-07-25)
- End
- Guidance in force through 2021 Q3 in its successive versions (read as 2021-09-30)
- In force
- July 25, 2020 to Sept. 30, 2021
- Quarters
- 2020 Q32020 Q42021 Q12021 Q22021 Q3
2020 Q22020 Q32020 Q42021 Q12021 Q22021 Q3
- Limitation types
- Workplace rulesQuarantine and isolation
- Addressees
- Character
- guidance incorporated
- Collection
- Standing duties: South Carolina DUT-SC
Operative words
DHEC is providing this generalized guidance for use by employers and employees to determine the best practices to utilize in various scenarios involving COVID-19 in the workplace.... If the employee was in close contact with someone with whom they do not live, they must quarantine for 14 days after their last contact with the positive person.
Penalty
none in itself; incorporated by the Governor's orders as 'sanitation guidelines promulgated by the CDC, DHEC, or any other state or federal public health officials' that restaurants and Gathering hosts 'shall take reasonable steps to incorporate, implement, comply with, and adhere to' (Ex. SC-027 §§ 3(A)(1), 4(B)(4)) and by Act No. 99 § 3(5) as 'public health guidance'
What it required
Employers are told to send positive and symptomatic employees home, to keep positive employees out until DHEC's return-to-work criteria are met, to perform a coworker exposure assessment and notify close contacts, to clean and disinfect the area where the infected employee worked, and that exposed employees 'must quarantine for 14 days'; the guidance's own verbs are 'should' for employer actions and 'must' for the quarantine periods.
Retrieval noteRecorded as guidance. Its employer-action verbs are 'should' ('Employee should remain out of work until they have recovered'; 'The area where the infected employee worked should be cleaned and disinfected'); its quarantine verbs are 'must'. Its compulsory force for restaurants and Gathering hosts came from EO 2020-50, 2020-63 and 2020-73 ('shall take reasonable steps to... comply with, and adhere to any applicable sanitation guidelines promulgated by the CDC, DHEC'), for every employer from § 41-15-80 read with SC OSHA's statement that 'Employers must ensure... that sick employees stay home' (Ex. DUT-SC-014), and for every covered entity from Act No. 99 § 4. scdhec.gov no longer resolves (DHEC's public-health functions passed to the Department of Public Health on July 1, 2024); the exhibit is the Wayback Machine's copy of the original PDF.