Court finds comp claim alleging long COVID injury not compensable

An appeals court in West Virginia Friday rejected the long COVID-related expansion of an occupational injury workers compensation claim for a university hospital worker who contracted COVID-19 in late 2021.

West Virginia University in early 2022 accepted a workers compensation claim for the COVID-19 infection suffered by a physician’s assistant, who requested to expand his workers comp claim to include several long-term health issues, according to No. 24-ICA-103, filed in the Intermediate Court of Appeals of West Virginia.

The state Workers’ Compensation Board of Review affirmed a claim administrator’s order denying the additional diagnoses of restrictive lung disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, nocturnal hypoxia, chronic fatigue, decrease in cognition/memory, and post-COVID-19 syndrome and dyssomnia. It also affirmed the denial of additional tests, stating they were unrelated to the COVID-19 infection.

Court records documented over a year’s worth of medical visits, many of which did not connect the man’s health and conditions to his COVID-19 infection. At one visit the worker complained of “shortness of breath and chronic fatigue” and that “he was diagnosed with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia thirty years prior, that he had chronic fatigue due to a presumptive illness acquired while in the Gulf War.” He had been on medication for “four or five years” for chronic myalgia, records state.

The appellate court, in affirming the earlier decision to deny the claim expansion for “secondary conditions,” said the “Board also noted that (the man) had a long history of multiple conditions that preexisted his COVID-19 diagnosis” and “that there is no evidence from a psychiatrist that (the worker) has PTSD.”

“Complaints of chronic fatigue, decrease in cognition/memory, dyssomnia, and post-COVID-19 syndrome are subjective symptoms that can be attributed to conditions that preexisted his COVID-19 diagnosis,” the ruling states.