WCIRB: Reporting Lags for Deaths Suggest Long Tail for COVID-19 Claims

Although only a few hundred worker deaths in California have been attributed to COVID-19, the share of death claims that provided the first notice of a pandemic-related injury was high at times throughout the pandemic, according to the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau. "A lot of these claims where the employee dies aren’t actually reported until after the employee dies," said Laura Carstensen, WCIRB vice president of actuarial research. "And so that does imply that we could potentially have a pretty long reporting tail on the COVID death claims. The...