In the COVID-19 occupational disease cases, everyone wants to go straight to individual causation. In other words, how can I prove that this employee can only have gotten this disease at work.
That is not how these cases are going to go.
There will be many widely scattered cases where you have one or two employees get COVID-19 and you can't figure out if/how they got it at work. Those are not the cases to worry about from a litigation or liability standpoint. Most people will get better. Their claims will be cheap, if filed at all.
The cases to worry about are the ones where there is an outbreak at the employer (like at meat packing facilities), a bunch of folks get sick, one dies, and it can be established that there were infectious people on the premises interacting with the plaintiff/decedent at time of infection AND employer failed to abide by known safety/sanitation standards. Right now it seems employers are instead focused on pre-injury COVID-19 waivers or sleeping easy about the plaintiff's burden to prove causation in the midst of a pandemic.
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