Covid-19 disease: Injury at work or an occupational disease?

Abstract

The COVID-19 disease pandemic has opened a number of legal issues, one of which is the need to define COVID-19 as a possible consequence of performing work. In that sense, the question arose whether it could be qualified as an injury at work or as an occupational disease. When it comes to the comparative law, this need to put COVID-19 in a professional context has already been answered in various ways, and the wandering in that process (due to the complexity of the issue) is probably best illustrated by the fact that in some systems it takes on the nature of a legal chameleon that is adjusting itself to a sector of work or to a period of exposure to the virus. In the Republic of Serbia, on the other hand, the controversy on this issue is still ongoing - which is also the reason why a review of comparative legal experiences is necessary. And while the qualification of COVID-19 as an injury at work is problematic due to the fact that it is hard to define an event that could be characterized as an accident at work that produced such a consequence, the qualification of COVID-19 as an occupational disease encounters other problems. Most of those problems in the Republic of Serbia, on the other hand, are systemic in nature and, therefore, require fixes of the existing legal gaps and systematic changes of the existing regulations by the Serbian lawmaker. Additionally, when it comes to COVID-19, the one question that arises is the question of causality - having in mind that in this day and age we are all in contact with the SARS-CoV-2 virus to a greater or to a lesser extent. In that sense, occupational medicine will be entrusted with the difficult task of determining the occupational origin of this disease - since it does not seem fair to recognize the status of an occupational disease to an employee if there are reasonable suspicions on the matter whether the infection took place during his performance of his work tasks.