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Showing 2 posts from March 2020.

Michigan's Emergency Rules Give Personal Injury Presumption to "First Response Employees" with COVID-19

As you know, Governor Gretchen Whitmer recently declared a State of Emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of that response, Governor Whitmer, in conjunction with the Director of the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, Jeff Donofrio, promulgated Emergency Rules (“Rules”) regarding workers’ compensation coverage for certain employees working in the health field, including first responders. We discussed the Rules in an earlier article, and we prepared this article in response to several questions we have received from clients in order to clarify some of the ambiguities in the Rules.

Categories: COVID-19 and Workers' Compensation

The Workers' Compensation Issues Raised by Coronavirus Pandemic and Michigan's Newly Promulgated Emergency Rules for "First Response Employees"

The Current Context

The novel Coronavirus (“COVID-19”), now classified as a full blown pandemic by the World Health Organization, is projected to continue spreading across Michigan and the United States over the next few months. In less than a month, the global number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has tripled from about 75,000 cases on February 20, 2020, to more than a quarter million cases as of Friday, March 20. The Washington Examiner reports that the death toll surpassed 10,000 last week. The World Health Organization has warned of the likelihood of continued “exponential growth.” For more on the impact of these emergency rules, see here.

Categories: COVID-19 and Workers' Compensation