Jose Rivero, a lawyer in Chicago, filed more than 30 labor claims for people who said they hired Covid-19 while on the job. In 10 of their cases, including one involving a refrigerator worker, workers died.
Each claim was denied. Insurers who denied the claims said it was not possible to prove that workers were infected at work. Rivero said he plans to challenge the denials in court.
Determining where someone hired Covid-19 is proving to be a difficult legal puzzle. In many workers’ compensation cases, carriers said individuals were likely infected in their spare time, while workers’ lawyers said their clients’ Covid-19 cases were directly linked to unsafe work environments.
Insurers and business groups feared at the beginning of the pandemic that they would be oppressed by workers’ compensation claims related to Covid-19. This concern intensified when more than a dozen states passed laws that gave some employees, including nurses and firefighters, a presumption of eligibility or access to workers’ compensation coverage without requiring them to prove that infections occurred at work.
These fears proved unfounded. Workers filed hundreds of thousands of virus-related complaints in 2020, but these cases, according to state and industry data, were more than offset by a sharp drop in complaints unrelated to Covid-19, as layoffs , stoppages and remote work reduced the number of work accidents and injuries.