Coronavirus poses a tough question: Did NYC essential workers die in the line of duty?

NEW YORK — Catherine and Raymond Abear had planned to buy waterfront property in Florida, trading in their hectic city life for sun, surf and downtime with their children: 5-month-old Stella and 2-year-old Jackson.

In a matter of two weeks, the coronavirus torpedoed that dream.

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The illness infected both parents in its stampede through New York City last month, killing the 43-year-old NYPD detective and turning a 37-year-old stay-at-home mom into a shell-shocked widow. Her husband, like all coronavirus victims, has not been granted „line of duty“ status that would provide health insurance to his family. So instead of planning trips to Disney World, Abear is now figuring out how to pay for her daughter’s next vaccine.

“My husband had 19 years on the job, so he was going to retire next year and every day he would talk about his retirement,” she said in a recent interview. “He was so looking forward to spending time with his family, especially his kids. Now it’s just going to be so different.”

Abear is part of an undesired club with open admission: Relatives of municipal employees who showed up to work during the Covid-19 outbreak, caught the virus and died. So far, 245 city workers have been lost to the illness — teachers who attended school before Mayor Bill de Blasio shut down the system, paramedics who transport critically ill patients day after day and police detectives like Abear, whose jobs cannot be performed over FaceTime.

Not since Sept. 11 has an outside threat so swiftly devastated the city’s ranks, and as the virus continues its onslaught, it is likely to leave more municipal employees in its wake.

This is forcing city and state officials to confront an ethical dilemma of untold proportions: Did employees who came to work during a pandemic-induced quarantine die as a direct result? What responsibility does the government have to their surviving families if the virus cannot be traced to their time on the clock? And with a death toll still climbing, what is the financial cost to the city’s coffers as a recession looms?

Politicians across New York are grappling with these questions as union leaders mount a campaign to ensure their members lost to the virus are granted “line of duty” status. The designation is reserved, quite simply, for workers who were injured or died doing their jobs: Cops shot at a crime scene, firefighters lost in burning buildings and so on. The value of the benefit varies among city agencies and is awarded by a ruling of the individual’s pension board.

“Health officials made a determination that this disease was so deadly that the general public must stay home and yet we still asked certain essential workers to show up every day,” City Council Member Joe Borelli, a Staten Island Republican, said. “If they had to go to work in a dangerous situation, then they contracted it in the course of their duty. And there’s a cost to it and the city and state should incur those costs.”

Borelli is requesting de Blasio sign an executive order granting widows like Abear continued health benefits until he and the state Legislature sort out these thornier questions.

The mayor’s press office would not respond to questions about Borelli’s demand or any other plans to deal with this situation, instead laying the problem at the door of the White House.

“The president left New Yorkers without the tools we needed to protect ourselves; the least he can do now is support families who have suffered unspeakable loss. The federal government should provide death benefits to those eligible,” de Blasio said in a prepared statement.

Shortly after Raymond Abear died on April 13, his wife got her own chest X-ray. As she was preparing to settle the payment, she discovered his health insurance had died with him. So she shelled out $275 and began to wonder how she would pay for her daughter’s next pediatric visit.

“We made a decision together that he would work and support our family financially and I would stay home and raise our children. Right now I’m in a position where I have to immediately figure out both of those roles,” she said.

Should the five NYPD detectives who died from the coronavirus be granted line of duty status by the police pension board, Abear would get her husband’s health benefits and a portion of his $97,324 salary for life. Without it, she will need to find immediate income and apply for extended benefits, or COBRA, which could cost up to $2,000 a month.

The detectives’ union is covering costs for prescription drugs, eyeglasses and dental work for families of the deceased, while pushing for legislation in Albany that would ensure workers who were deemed “essential” and then contracted Covid-19 are presumed to have gotten ill on the job.

“There is no difference between being shot in the line of duty and dying from this coronavirus,” Paul DiGiacomo, the union president, said. As he spoke, two other detectives lay in critical condition from the illness.

He is instructing his members to maintain scrupulous records documenting instances of potential exposure. “We do not know what the future holds, and whether those who test positive for antibodies may suffer harm down the road,” reads a memo the union posted online Friday.

“We’re documenting everything to make sure that all of our detectives are protected and this mistake doesn’t happen again like it did on 9/11,” DiGiacomo said.

Line-of-duty status for city employees who worked on Sept. 11 relief efforts did not come easy.

State legislation signed four years after the attacks entitled city workers who responded and subsequently came down with illnesses to disability pensions worth 75 percent of their salaries. Those benefits were later extended to survivors of uniformed workers, amounting to larger pension payouts that could last a lifetime.

Lawmakers are now using that legislation as a starting point to craft a benefit structure for Covid-19 victims. The Sept. 11 bill, which then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg opposed on fiscal grounds, required subsequent updates. In fact, it wasn’t until last year that Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill extending the same pension benefits to non-uniformed city workers who were part of the World Trade Center clean-up.

“We just finished an 18-year fight to secure treatment and benefits for all of our 9/11 heroes,” said Pat Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, which represents 24,000 rank-and-file officers. “Our elected leaders absolutely cannot put the heroes of this pandemic through the same ordeal.”

So far one member of the PBA has died from the virus. Lynch advised the remaining relatives to file for line-of-duty benefits, in effect daring the police pension board to deny them when it comes time for a ruling.

Albany lawmakers said this effort is an even larger undertaking than the protracted Sept. 11 fight.

For starters, it’s unclear how long the pandemic will last and it has already cost more than six times as many New Yorkers’ lives as the terror attack. Elected officials are also preparing for the possibility that workers who contracted the virus could develop health problems later in life.

“9/11 was narrow — devastating for a variety of reasons, but it was a different thing. It was a single day,” said state Sen. Diane Savino, a Staten Island Democrat working on the bill. “This is the plague. As crazy as it sounds, this is a modern version of the plague.”

Savino also wants to mandate benefits for the surviving families of essential employees who work in the private sector, like grocery clerks and delivery workers.

The cost of it all has not been determined.

Meanwhile Cuomo has called on the federal government to set-up a “heroes compensation fund” to help support frontline workers, and the MTA has agreed to grant death benefits of up to $500,000 to the families of the more than 80 transit workers who have died of the coronavirus.

The FDNY has reported 10 fatalities, including fire inspectors, emergency medical technicians and paramedics, who make significantly less money than firefighters. Just last week, the union representing more than 20,000 active and retired firefighters announced that while none have died from the coronavirus, more than 17 percent of the agency tested positive for antibodies, indicating a likelihood of infection.

The chief medical officer for the department has issued a declaration that all its workers were exposed to the virus — a blanket ruling that union officials say would help in securing line-of-duty status.

“I personally cannot imagine a member’s death directly related to this pandemic not being defined as line-of-duty,” Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said in a recent video conference with members.

The teachers union is joining the effort as well, arguing its members were put in harm’s way during the first two weeks of March, when school was in session as Covid-19 affixed its grip on the city. So far 68 Department of Education employees have died from the contagion.

Mike Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said the de Blasio administration moved too slowly to close schools and did not equip staff with adequate protective gear like masks and gloves. He stopped short of blaming the mayor’s actions for the climbing death toll, but called for adequate support for remaining families.

“This is a moral imperative,” he said. “Every other large municipality, they all closed their systems down much earlier than New York City.”

Meanwhile, Catherine Abear is trying to determine how to survive financially with no job during an economic free fall and restrictions on leaving her children with relatives.

“They’re so young that they don’t really have a concept of time, so he doesn’t know how much time has gone by since he hasn’t seen his dad,” she said of her son Jackson. “He asks questions about him all the time, but eventually that’s going to stop, because he’s going to forget.”

Danielle Muoio contributed to this report.

Source: politico.com
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