CWCIs COVID-19 and Non-COVID-19 Interactive Data App Now Available

CWCI has posted the latest update to our COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 Interactive Data App, featuring data derived from 1,067,440 claims from AY 2019 and AY 2020, reported to the Division of Workers’ Compensation as of November 16 – including the 53,943 COVID-19 claims reported this year.  As of November 16, DWC’s Workers’ Compensation Information System (WCIS) had received reports on 478,934 workers’ comp claims with January through October 2020 injury dates, which even with the COVID-19 claims, is 18.6% less than the 588,506 claims reported for the first 10 months of AY 2019, or 12.8% less than the total claim count projected by the Institute after applying claim development factors to account for the reporting time lags on the 2020 claims.  Among other key findings in the latest app:

• The monthly tally of COVID-19 claims peaked at 14,688 claims in July, then fell sharply to 6,365 claims in August and 4,024 claims in September, but the downtrend may be over as there have already been 3,820 COVID-19 claims with October injury dates reported.
• COVID-19 claims as a percent of all California work injury claims also peaked in July, hitting 24.9%, but for the first 10 months of 2020, COVID-19 claims accounted for 11.1% of all claims.
• A new filter in the Denial/Notification tab allows users to view results by industry and for insured and/or self-insured claims. For example, data on insured COVID-19 claims from August show that 32.1% of claims from retail workers were denied vs. 61.2% of claims from construction workers.   
• As of November 16, DWC had recorded 708 death claims for AY 2020, of which 302 (42.7%) were COVID-19 claims. In 2019, there were 670 non-COVID-19 death claims reported to WCIS through October, and 748 for the full year, so even though overall claim volume is down, with the addition of the COVID-19 death claims the number of death claims in 2020 is on track to surpass the 2019 total.   
• Los Angeles County has accounted for 14,366 (27.2%) of California’s COVID-19 claims, but Imperial County, the agricultural region east of San Diego, has had the highest rate of COVID-19 claims per 100,000 employees (170.8), followed by Kings County (103.9) and Lassen County (75.5).
• Workers under the age of 40 account for over half of the COVID-19 claims: 27.0% involve 30-39 year olds; 24.7% involve 20-29 year olds, and 1.9% involve workers under the age of 20.
• Notification lags on COVID-19 claims have improved but remain longer than those for non-COVID claims. For example, among August claims, COVID-19 claims averaged 5.2 days from injury date to employer notice, and 9.1 days from employer notice to claims administrator notice, for an average of 14.4 days from the date of injury to the claims administrator notice.  In contrast, non-COVID claims averaged 3.3 days from injury date to employer notice, and 4.9 days from employer notice to claims administrator notice, for an average of 8.2 days from injury date to claims administrator notice.  

In addition to claim counts and trends, the app allows users to generate detailed data on COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 claims, including claim distributions by region, industry, gender, and for insured or self-insured claims.  The app is available to CWCI members and to the public by clicking here.

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