Lord Hendy QC and Jane Deighton produced an article on personal protective equipment and the law in the Law Society Gazette published on the 4th May 2020.
‘According to the government on 29 April, the UK Covid-19 peak has passed.
This will be small comfort to the families of those who have died of it. On 28 April the ONS recorded 8,758 deaths referable to Covid-19 in the week ending 17 April (the last week for which the figures were available), a significant increase on the 6,213 Covid-19 related deaths in the previous week. The ONS has the total number of Covid-19 deaths between 1 March and 18 April as 20,283. Extrapolation to 1 May would suggest a total number of deaths at somewhere around 38,000.
Some of these deaths are amongst workers who do not enjoy the luxury of working from home or being furloughed on 80% of wages. Workers who have died may have contracted the illness travelling to work. Others will have contracted it at work because their employer failed to provide sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE), failed to clean work surfaces and equipment or failed to arrange work so as to preserve social distancing.’
To read the full article, please click here.
