Workers' compensation protection expires for COVID-19 cases in Florida
FORT PIERCE, Fla. (CBS12) — An executive order put in place to protect those who protect Floridians during the pandemic has expired. Now tens of thousands of first responders, healthcare workers and other employees are left unprotected if they were to claim work-related coronavirus infection.
You may assume that if you contract the virus while you are at work, then you should be covered by workers’ compensation and that your employer’s workers’ compensation insurance should kick in under the Florida Workers’ Compensation Act. Yet, that is not always the case.
There’s a great deal of Complexity Behind Coverage for Covid-19 but to break it all down is workers’ compensation attorney Michael Horowitz in Vero Beach.
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"We had an executive order that protected frontline workers but it ended, and I don’t know if anybody knows it ended," said Horowitz.
Generally speaking— workers’ compensation insurance does not cover routine community-spread illnesses.
The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, which works closely with the Florida Department of Health, made some exceptions back in 2020. First responders, health care workers, correction officers and others who contract COVID-19 due to work-related exposure had been eligible for workers’ compensation benefits under this Florida law that was put in place at the onset of the pandemic.
But proving the employee’s coronavirus infection is in fact linked to work exposure Attorney Kelly Cambron says is tough.
