Judge Orders Boss Who Coughed at Employee During Pandemic to Pay Damages

A judge in Wales has ordered a businessman to pay a former employee thousands of pounds in damages for deliberately coughing at her during the coronavirus pandemic.

Court papers shared publicly this week revealed that an employment tribunal judge in Wrexham found that the businessman, Kevin Davies, must pay his former employee 26,438 pounds, nearly $35,000, for his “inexcusable” conduct.

The ruling about the incident, in 2020, served as a reminder of the challenges businesses and their employees faced during the early days of the pandemic, as countries navigated social distancing and in some cases went into lockdown.

The former employee, who was not named by the tribunal, had worked for a property company owned by Mr. Davies in Newcastle Emlyn, a town in northwest Wales, since December 2017.

The court heard that she suffered from an autoimmune condition that made her particularly vulnerable to Covid-19. She had repeatedly asked colleagues to practice social distancing once the government announced safety measures in early 2020 to stop the spread of the virus — but her requests were dismissed, court records showed.

On March 17 of that year — days before Britain went into lockdown — Mr. Davies coughed “deliberately and loudly” in the woman’s direction then loudly commented that she was being ridiculous for requesting social distancing, the court records showed.

“His purpose was to ridicule and intimidate,” Judge Tobias Vincent Ryan said in his ruling.

Judge Ryan dismissed Mr. Davies’ denial of the incident — noting that other employees had heard and testified to it — and added that his conduct was “inexcusable and cannot be discounted as a joke or something light-hearted.”

The former employee’s autoimmune condition was documented before the pandemic. Diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, a chronic condition that creates a painful stiffness in the joints and affects the person’s skin, the woman had been given a chair with lumbar support by her employer, who had also adapted her sign-in procedure, the court heard.

But the coronavirus brought an added risk to office work. Studies showed that people with existing autoimmune conditions, like arthritis, had an increased risk of respiratory complications and were more likely to die from Covid-19.

After the coughing incident, the woman complained to human resources. When that complaint went nowhere, according to court records, she went to the police. By June of that year, she had resigned over what she described as an “untenable” workplace environment.

The woman, who remains anonymous, told a Welsh newspaper after the ruling that the March 2020 incident had left her “shaken.” Mr. Davies, the father of celebrated Welsh rugby player Gareth Davies, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.