Appendix II: Draft template letter for employers to send employees Important note: To meet their duty to facilitate compliance with testing and medical examination requirements, PCBUs/employers must provide specific information to their workers, which advises them of: •
The requirement to undergo testing and medical examination; and
• The testing period that applies to each affected person. This draft letter does not meet this requirement, as it is not specific to the individual worker – it is provided to assist PCBUs/employers with communicating the new Order requirements to their workers only. Dear [Name of employee] The COVID-19 Public Health Response (Required Testing) Order 2020 (Required Testing Order) requires certain workers at higher-risk of workplace exposure to COVID-19 to undergo regular testing. As of 11.59 pm on 21 April 2021 changes have been made to the Required Testing Order to further strengthen the border testing regime. These changes are in response to the new community cases detected in Auckland in February 2021, and the presence in New Zealand of more transmissible variants of COVID-19, first identified in the UK, South Africa and Brazil. Workers in many roles have been required to be tested for some time. Workers in these roles continue to need to be tested. We thank you for your continued cooperation if you work in one of these roles. The changes to the Required Testing Order mean that persons who perform work in the following role at or around airports must now also be tested every 14 days: 1. Workers who handle affected items that have been removed from an affected aircraft within 24 hours of the item being removed from the affected aircraft, and who have contact with a member of a group of air border workers or officials who is already required to be tested under the Required Testing Order, while both are working. Note: o
An affected aircraft is an aircraft (other than an aircraft undertaking a QFT flight) which has arrived from a location outside New Zealand.
o
An affected item is an item that: ➢ is not cargo or freight, and ➢ has been removed for cleaning, disposal and/or re-use on an aircraft. ❖ In the aviation context, “freight” refers to goods which are not passengers’ baggage and are transported in an aircraft’s cargo compartment and not in the cabin. ❖ “Re-use” refers to items that are to be returned to an aircraft after being removed from the same or a different aircraft.
o
“Have contact with”, in relation to contact with a member of a group of air border workers or border officials, means: ➢ having face-to-face contact within 2 metres of each other for 15 minutes or more; or 20
