Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

Workers’ compensation provides the exclusive remedy for injuries and illness that employees suffer arising out of and within the course of their employment.  In the early stages of this pandemic, work-related travel to high impact countries or work-related exposure in a case that was being tracked by public health authorities provided support for work-related exposure.  In healthcare settings, work-related exposure will likely be established when exposure to infected patients occurs.  But in other settings and as the diseases spreads in the United States, the analysis about whether an illness is covered by workers’ compensation will be more difficult.

Workers’ Compensation and “Ordinary Diseases of Life”:  Many states do not authorize workers’ compensation coverage for “ordinary diseases of life.”  Employers should review their own state workers’ compensation laws closely, but an ordinary disease of life is generally defined as an illness to which the general public is equally exposed, and is not a result of the peculiar or unique nature of an employee’s job.  At this stage of the pandemic within the United States, it is possible that state workers’ compensation commissions may view COVID-19 as an ordinary disease of life because untraced community infection is widespread.  In that case, an employee would not qualify for workers’ compensation, and the employer’s workers’ compensation insurance might not apply.