Govt climbs down on COVID-19 tests
GOVERNMENT has made a drastic climbdown on its earlier order requiring companies to ensure all their workers are tested for coronavirus first before they resume work.
Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting has since allowed businesses to open before tests are conducted on employees after industry resisted the order which it claimed was an indirect abdication of responsibility by government.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government promulgated Statutory Instrument 99 of 2020 which stipulates that all companies in the commercial and industrial sectors opening for the first time during the period of the lockdown should have all employees tested for the COVID-19 virus using the rapid results tests.
“It has since transpired that companies are experiencing difficulties in accessing the rapid results test kits for testing their employees,” Information minister Monica Mutsvangwa said after the Cabinet meeting.
“In order to facilitate companies in the commercial and industrial sectors opening in terms of the relaxation pronounced under SI 99 of 2020, government has decided that, pending companies acquiring the required test kits to test their employees, companies will be permitted to open subject to the following conditions being met in relation to their employees.”
Instead, companies are now supposed to ensure that they conduct “temperature tests upon entering work premises, issue hand sanitisers upon entry to sanitise their hands, that each employee wears a face mask in appropriate form and employees to practise social distancing in the workplace.”
Business led by Employers’ Confederation of Zimbabwe president, Israel Murefu, had said government had given business an unrealistic task which came with a huge cost.
“If you look at capacity, the national response managed in more than 30 days to do just 9 000 tests, yet government expects in just 14 days for companies to have tested over a million workers. It's just not practical or feasible,” he said.
Murefu said they could also not meet the cost of the tests with private laboratories given that most companies have not been operating for the past two months.
“The cheapest quotation for tests is US$25 and the most expensive is US$100. Now for most companies that have not been operating, there will be no budget for this. While the idea is noble and business is sympathetic and would want to ensure employees and their families are safe, the cost is just beyond reach, unless government proposes to include the cost of testing in the $18 billion stimulus package they are proposing,” Murefu said.