Jose Rivero, a Chicago attorney, has filed more than 30 employee compensation claims for people who said they contracted Covid-19 while on the job. In ten of his cases, including one involving an employee at a meat packaging plant, the workers died.
Each claim was dismissed. The insurers who rejected the claims said it could not be proved that the workers were infected. Mr. Rivero said he intends to face the denial in court.
Determining where someone contracted Covid-19 seems to be a difficult legal mystery. In many cases of workers’ compensation, transportation companies said individuals were likely to be infected during their free hours, while employees’ attorneys said their clients’ Covid-19 cases were directly related to unsafe work environments.
Insurance companies and business groups feared at the start of the pandemic that they would be overwhelmed by workers’ compact claims regarding Covid-19. This concern increased as more than a dozen states passed laws that some employees, including nurses and firefighters, had a suspicion of being eligible for, or had access to workers’ coverage without requiring them to prove that infections occurred at work.
These fears appear to be unfounded. Workers filed hundreds of thousands of virus-related claims in 2020, but according to government and industry data, the cases were more than offset by a sharp drop in non-Covid-19 claims, as layoffs, closures and remote work increased the number of accidents and injuries on workplace.