For those employers and employees still uncertain, this is the position on pay for pandemic absenteeism from work during testing, while waiting for test results, and during 'contact leave" because you are, or have been in direct contact with someone who has tested positive, and covid itself.

There is an overriding obligation every employer has toward the safety and health of all their employees as well as to customers and to the community as a whole.

Covid testing

For the employee: you are required to stay at home until the results are known, just in case you are positive and could be spreading the virus. That is a government requirement.

The government will not compensate you for lost wages (unless you are employed by the government). The private-sector employer is not obligated to pay you for the time not at work unless it is at the employer's orders that you go for the test. However, if you test positive the employer can cover it under the sick-leave provisions in your contract, or under the sick-leave provisions of the Minimum Wages Ordinance, which are '14 working days sick leave annually with pay subject to having been continuously employed for at least six months, and the production of a medical certificate.

'Payment for sick leave shall amount to the difference between an employee's pay and his entitlement to sickness benefit under the National Insurance Act.'

If you test negative, you are not able to claim payment for the required absence from work as sick leave because the test showed that you were not sick.

For the employer: There is no legal obligation to pay the employee for any time they spend not at work at the government's mandate, unless there is an existing provision in their individual or collective contract expressly stating that employees will be paid either at full pay, half pay or a quarter pay during government enforced pandemic leave.

Employees cannot be fired while they wait for the test results.

Unless the results are positive, the days absent cannot be deducted from statutory sick pay, either, if the employee is not sick.

It is important that such provisions be considered

now, drafted and put into employment contracts, because there will be many more viral infections. Remember swine flu? And bird flu? And chikungunya? And dengue every couple of years? And the one after chikungunya and before covid19? Was it zika? There will always be another one coming.

A WHO employee told me his organisation tried very hard to have several of them declared pandemics as well at the time, but didn't succeed. We all seemed to get them, suffer, and get over them.

This time it is a pandemic and going forward, there officially will be others, so it is better to take in front before in front takes you.

Advice: Waiting for free government test results can take up to ten days. A private test can cost as much as $950 but you can get the results, usually, within 24 hours. If you can afford it, pay for the private test rather than lose ten days' pay or ten days' performance an