Equinox Gold’s culture of shared responsibility encourages team members to take responsibility for their own safety and the safety of their co-workers. Every day starts with a safety meeting, and the Company ensures its team members have the knowledge, skills and equipment they need to operate safely.
| TRIFR | Lost Time Injuries | LTIFR | Fatalities |
| 3.56 | 6 | 0.93 | 0 |
TRIFR: Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (all injuries requiring first aid treatment) per million hours worked
LTIFR: Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate per million hours worked
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided additional challenges for health and safety staff and management. During Q2 2020 the Company started proactively testing its workforce for COVID-19, rather than testing when an individual shows symptoms, with the objective of identifying carriers early so that they can self-isolate before inadvertently spreading the virus to others. All individuals who test positive, regardless of whether they show any symptoms, are asked to immediately self-isolate for two weeks and can only return to work once they have tested negative for COVID-19 and been cleared for work by a health professional. Proactive testing, enhanced health and safety measures that are described here and the Company’s “test, trace, isolate” protocol have helped the Company to reduce transmission of the COVID-19 virus as much as possible to protect both its workforce and local communities.
Equinox Gold’s Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate, which is a measure of all injuries that require the attention of medically trained personnel, was 5.35 per million hours worked for 2019.
At the Company’s Aurizona Mine, the team completed construction of the mine with no lost-time injuries, with more than 1.8 million construction hours worked during 2018 and the first half of 2019. The Los Filos Mine has made significant safety improvements. In 2019, the lost-time injury frequency rate was reduced 76% from the previous year. The Mesquite Mine achieved a milestone in November 2019 of working more than three years with no lost-time injuries.