When 29-year-old Corey Martin got Covid in May 2020, he says, it was “like a bus.”

An essential and overworked counselor at Hampshire House, a Manchester halfway house run by the Boston-based Community Resources for Justice, Martin didn’t even remember being taken to the Elliot Hospital, where he was put on a ventilator for 17 days. His mother later told him that he “was staring right through my Mom like she wasn’t there.”

What he mainly remembers when he first regained consciousness were those haunting hallucinations about horrible things happening to his family and, when they faded away, about more sober thoughts — how they were going to pay for all this with him not working.

Even when he had a tube in his stomach and “was fighting for my very life, you think, ‘How am I going to support my family?’” Martin applied for workers’ compensation shortly after he returned home in mid-June. He figured he got Covid at work. His family members were all staying at home, and he was working 50 to 60 hours a week in the midst of an outbreak that eventually infected 16 residents and four staffers, according to state records, and forced the facility to temporarily shut down and transfer out all residents.

But his company — according to his attorney, Anna Goulet Zimmerman — initially denied that there was any possibility of him being paid workers’ compensation, maintaining he didn’t contract it at work.

“You need to open up a claim even though you don’t think it was valid,” Zimmerman recalled telling them. (A call left with a CRJ media specialist was not returned by deadline.)

The business’s insurance company also fought the claim for the same reasons, but a hearing officer at the Department of Labor sided with Martin. Yes, it was possible that Martin picked up the virus elsewhere, “but in light of all the evidence, common sense tells that it is most likely that the claimant got it at work,” the officer wrote.

Martin was awarded his medical expenses and 60 percent of his pay in accordance with New Hampshire law — one of the least generous payments, when it comes to wage replacement, in the country. For Martin, that’s $646 a week, or $33,000 a year. Subsequent decisions have ruled that he still can’t work, both because of the post-traumatic stress from his hospital stay and the bad back he developed there while prone for weeks at the hospital.

Nevertheless, Martin’s case is the exception, not the rule. Despite the concern about a tsunami of Covid-related litigation at the start of the pandemic, there have been very little, partly because workers’ compensation laws shield employers from being sued by their employees. But workers’ compensation filings and losses didn’t go up during the pandemic. They went down.

At the start of the pandemic, according to a June 2021 report from the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) — a trade group that collects data from 45 states including New Hampshire — at least 45,000 Covid-related claims were paid across the country, with $260 million losses. That may sound like a lot, but it amounts to eight claims per 10,000 workers, as opposed to 250 for non-Covid claims. Furthermore, they mostly were restricted to certain industries. Threequarters of the Covid claims were filed by healthcare workers and first responders, while hospitality and retail employees accounted for 14 percent.

Nationally, through 2020, insurers paid out $630 million to 80,000 Covid claims in 2020, about $7,800 a claim, according to a report NCCI released in January 2022. Still, that represents only 7.2 percent of total workers’ comp claims and 1.7 percent of total incurred dollars (costs paid out plus estimated costs to be paid).

Non-Covid claims fell 13 percent nationally, and even with Covid claims, losses still fell by 2.6 percent.

That disparity could be explained by the nature of Covid claims, which tend to be higher on replacement wages, or indemnity, compared to medical costs. New Hampshire had one of the highest percentages of such non-medical claims.

Although NCCI’s state breakdown figures are in percentages and ranges, its figures, according to the NH Insurance Department, show that total claims were down 18 percent, to 14,000, paying out $77 million, an 11 percent decline.

Graphs published in NCCI’s January report indicated that about 8 or 9 percent of New Hampshire’s claims were Covid-related in 2020, a little higher than the national median, while losses were nearly at the 1.7 percent national median. The report also indicates that there were fewer than 500 Covid-related claims in New Hampshire, and does not give a dollar figure for the losses incurred in the state.

Self-insured claims

But NCCI figures miss a lot. They don’t include self-insured workers’ comp programs, such as the risk pool for municipalities and school districts.

The New Hampshire Public Risk Management Exchange (Primex), administrator of that pooled fund, reports that it paid out $1.1 million to 1,165 Covid claimants in 2020 alone, more than twice the number of claimants that private insurers accepted, more than a fifth of all the workers’ comp payments it made. As of Feb. 3, Primex paid out some $2.7 million in accepting some 2,236 claims.

The larger number of claims is because many first responders work for municipalities, and, thanks to Gov. Chris Sununu’s now-expired emergency order, those with Covid were presumed to have contracted it at work.

Other states have similar presumptions, but most were put into statue by their state legislatures and many are broader. New Hampshire has no such legislation even pending. The closest thing this year is a bill that would grant workers’ comp to those getting side effects from an employer-mandated vaccine.

Indeed, the New Hampshire attorney general issued an opinion early in the pandemic, while Martin was still on the ventilator, that to receive workers’ comp for contracting Covid, a claimant must “determinatively demonstrate that the illness resulted from the risk of employment.”

This was actually too high a bar, argued Benjamin T. King, an attorney with Douglas, Leonard & Garvey who handles workers’ comp cases. He said he thought that the AG set the bar higher than in case law, where the standard is “preponderance of the evidence,” which he interpreted to mean “more likely than not.” But since then, “I have yet to handle such a claim,” King said. It’s hard for a worker to prove, and it’s so easy to deny. “All a carrier has to do is to check a box on a form, even if the evidence is abundant. It is the onus for the employee to prove and no consequence for frivolous denials.”

Employers don’t have to report a Covid case, unless they think the disease was transmitted at work. Employers did report nearly 6,000 Covid injury reports, according to the state Department of Labor, but that doesn’t mean they resulted in workers’ compensation claims. Indeed, even before any was filed, employers issued 1,400 denials to claims that said contracting the disease was related to employment.

It’s unclear how many cases are denied once files are claimed. Primex only did so for about 7 percent, but private insurers — especially with no presumption laws — might be less agreeable. Workers can challenge such denials, but attorneys see few of those cases.

“It’s such an endemic disease, said Mark Rufo, a Nashua attorney who specializes in workers’ comp. “Unless there is a known outbreak, the burden is on the employee to prove it was caused by the workplace. It’s not like, ‘I fell down at work and broke my leg.’ Fighting these things is an uphill battle.”

Besides, “most people, out of work for a few weeks, don’t bother. They collect unemployment,” said Jared O’Connor, a partner at Shaheen & Gordon who handles comp cases. Most of those cases were settled either before or during the hearing process, he said, including two he handled, where both occurred during an outbreak on the job. One involved a police officer with pulmonary issues.

Corey Martin’s ordeal

Only 11 disputed Covid cases were adjudicated by the Labor Department. The hearings are confidential, but the agency disclosed the results of nine of them. Claimants only won three, including a Covid unit nurse and another who was a captain in the state prison. Only two were represented by an attorney, including Corey Martin’s, which was exceptional because it was early in the pandemic, and most everybody was staying at home.

“Due to his status as an essential … critical employee, he was called upon to continue working, notwithstanding the stay-at-home order that applied to many occupations,” wrote the hearing officer in his initial ruling.

In addition, Martin was working overtime, sometimes at the front desk and otherwise meeting people in rooms. People were supposed to be wearing masks but weren’t.

Martin started feeling sick on May 2, but went into work anyway because of the shortage of workers at the halfway house. He worked through May 6, the day his supervisor tested positive after he had gone home, and by the time he tested positive on May 11, he was running a 103-degree fever. Two days later, an ambulance took Martin to Elliot Hospital. He was put into a coma and ventilated for 17 days.

Even when he was more aware of his surroundings, he couldn’t eat, drink or talk. He had a paralyzed vocal cord, so was fed through a feeding tube, something his family also had to do for months after he was released.

“I kept thinking, what’s going to happen? I was working so many hours, making really good money, and all that is taken away by sickness,” he said.

His family was worried too. They set up a GoFundMe site, which raised $13,845, short of the $25,000 goal and far short of medical expenses.

Martin worked for a nonprofit, but it was not one without resources. According to its latest filings with the Internal Revenue Service, Community Resources for Justice had gross receipts of $58.5 million in 2020, and paid $1.36 million to compensate its officers that year, including $378,000 for the CEO. It also spent nearly $200,000 on insurance, though it’s unclear whether that line item included workers’ compensation.

The Hampshire House program director wrote a memo two days after Martin’s release, that said that facility “had a cluster outbreak of Covid-19 causing most staff and residents to become ill, with one (the claimant) hospitalized and fighting for his life,” according to the decision.

In addition, the supervisor said that “he did not feel that the guidelines were being taken seriously, and he emphasized that compliance was mandatory; staff would be held accountable for non-compliance.”

Despite this, the employer denied the claim in July 2020, asserting there was no causal relationship to employment.

After a hearing in August, the hearing officer did note that on April 25, Martin went into a motorcycle dealer and could have picked up Covid there, but it was much more likely that he got it at work, where “protective measures were somewhat lax.”

Martin was featured on WMUR while he was fighting for his life — with a heartwarming follow-up showing his hospital release and an embrace with his son. But the station didn’t follow his health and financial struggles afterward.

Martin said the main reason he has been so willing to expose himself to the media is to show how serious the disease can be, even for young people without any underlying conditions.

“Don’t wait until it happens to you or a loved one,” he said.

Bob Sanders can be reached at bsanders@nhbr.com.