A Scottish employment tribunal has ruled recently that long COVID is a disability under the Equality Act 2010.
This case – Burke vs. Turning Point Scotland – could be a real landmark in recognising the effects of long COVID and employers should be alert to the consequences of this ruling.
The sickness absence rate in the UK was 2.2% in 2021 and is still rising; one in four absences was owing to a COVID-related matter.
Nearly half of all businesses (46%) have at least one employee who suffers from long COVID. At least two million people in the UK have some form of long COVID and about 400,000 are so affected they have a limited ability to work.
This means that about 4.5% of the working population of the UK has some form of long COVID and about 1% are in the latter category.
While the ruling in the above case is not binding, i.e., not every employee with long COVID is automatically classified as disabled, it will strengthen the cases of the more severely affected.
The problem currently is that there is no official medical definition of long COVID. Also, when the first cases appeared in the UK, there was no vaccine and the hospital treatment of those most affected was different to what is given now. Those affected in early 2020 may have different symptoms of long COVID, compared with more recent cases.
The most common symptoms are fatigue, shortness of breath, persistent cough and muscle ache – all of which can mean an employee is restricted in what they are able to do.
Employers need to understand this issue. If you employ a thousand people, the chances are that forty or fifty may have some issues with long COVID. This is not going to go away and employers will need to make reasonable adjustments, such as changes to hours and duties, longer rest breaks, as well as individual discussions to support them.