The recent outbreak of COVID-19 worldwide has seen countries,
communities, businesses and individuals being forced to navigate
through a myriad of advice in assessing the risk of the outbreak
and putting in place risk management measures to deal with the
outbreak. The potential business disruption from the outbreak
cannot be underestimated at any level.
We consider below some scenarios relevant to landlords and
tenants in light of the COVID-19 outbreak.
1. Do landlords or tenants have any reporting obligations under
their leases?
It is common to see leases include a provision dealing with
infectious disease.
From a tenant's perspective, these clauses usually require a
tenant to give prompt notice of an infectious disease to a landlord
(whether it has actually occurred or whether there is a reasonable
ground of it occurring) and also comply with all requirements of a
landlord in relation to the infectious disease.
