Jose Rivero, a Chicago attorney, has filed more than 30 workers’ compensation claims for people who said they contracted Covid-19 on the job. In 10 of his cases, including one involving an employee of a meat packaging plant, the workers died.
Every claim has been rejected. The insurers who denied the claims have said it cannot be proven that the workers were infected while on the job. Mr Rivero said he plans to challenge the denials in court.
Determining where a person has contracted Covid-19 turns out to be a difficult legal puzzle. In many workers ‘compensation cases, carriers said individuals were most likely infected during their off hours, while employee attorneys said their customers’ Covid-19 cases were directly related to unsafe work environments.
Insurance companies and corporate groups feared at the outset of the pandemic that they would be overwhelmed by employee claims related to Covid-19. Those concerns were heightened when more than a dozen states passed laws that made some workers, including nurses and firefighters, suspect that they were eligible, or had access to workers’ coverage without having to prove infections while on the job. occurred.
Those fears turned out to be unfounded. Workers filed hundreds of thousands of virus-related claims in 2020, but those cases, according to state and industry data, were more than offset by a sharp drop in non-Covid-19 claims as layoffs, shutdowns and remote work increase the number of accidents and workplace injuries.