Court Upholds Denial of Widow’s COVID-19 Workers’ Compensation Death Claim

The widow of a man who died from COVID-19 has been denied workers’ compensation benefits because she failed to prove that the death was work-related.

The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York on May 1 upheld the denial of benefits by the Workers Compensation Board.

Mariela Holder’s late husband worked as a house manager for the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities. On March 13, 2020, a vacation day, he began experiencing symptoms associated with COVID-19. He had last worked on March 11, 2020. He was admitted to a hospital and, ultimately, passed away on March 29, 2020. His death certificate identified the immediate cause of death as COVID-19.

His wife filed a claim for workers’ compensation death benefits in July 2020, alleging that her husband’s death was the result of his contracting COVID-19 during his employment.

His employer and its workers’ compensation carrier, the State Insurance Fund, denied her claim. However, following a hearing with testimony, a Workers’ Compensation Law Judge ruled in her favor and established the death benefits claim, finding that his death was causally-related to his employment.

Upon administrative review, the Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB) reversed and disallowed the claim, finding that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that COVID-19 was prevalent in her husband’s work environment prior to the onset of his symptoms.

The appeals court has now affirmed that denial, agreeing that the claimant did not meet the burden of establishing that her husband’s death arose out of and in the course of his or her employment.

The appeals court noted that COVID-19 in the workplace “reasonably qualifies as an unusual hazard, not the natural and unavoidable result of employment.” Whether a compensable accident has occurred is a question of fact to be resolved by the WCB. To this end, “the claimant bears the burden of establishing that the subject injury arose out of and in the course of his or her employment.”

According to WCB guidance, it was her burden to demonstrate either a specific exposure to COVID-19 or that there was a prevalence of COVID-19 in the work environment that presented an elevated risk of exposure constituting an extraordinary event; for example, workers with significant contact with the public in communities with high rates of infection or workers in a workplace experiencing high rates of infection.

The court agreed with the WCB that Holder offered no evidence of her husband’s specific exposure to COVID-19 in his workplace. Nor did she identify any cases of COVID-19 among those living or working in the group home where her husband was house manager, or among other employees with whom he may have had contact, prior to his onset of symptoms. In fact, the employer’s witness testified that he was the first known COVID-19 infection in his workplace. Moreover, the court added, the claimant did not know the extent to which, if at all, her husband personally interacted with others at the group home where he worked.

Topics Workers' Compensation Talent COVID-19