Jose Rivero, a Chicago lawyer, filed compensation claims for more than 30 people for people who said they contracted Covid-19 while working. In 10 of his cases, including one involving an employee at a meat packing factory, workers died.
Each request was rejected. Insurers who rejected the claims said it could not be proven that the workers were infected at work. Mr Rivero said he intended to challenge the denials in court.
Determining where a person contracted Covid-19 turns out to be a difficult legal puzzle. In many workers’ compensation cases, carriers said individuals were most likely infected during free time, while workers’ lawyers said their customers’ Covid-19 cases were directly related to unsafe work environments.
Insurance carriers and business groups feared at the beginning of the pandemic that they would be overwhelmed by workers’ demands for Covid-19 workers. This concern has intensified as more than a dozen states have enacted laws that give employees, including nurses and firefighters, the presumption of eligibility or access to workers’ compensation coverage without requiring them to prove infections in the workplace.
These fears proved unfounded. Workers filed hundreds of thousands of virus-related claims in 2020, but these cases, according to state and industry data, were more than offset by a sharp decline in non-Covid-19 demand, as layoffs, closures and remote work reduced the number of accidents and injuries at work.