Healthcare facilities are required to alert U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) officials about work-related employee deaths within eight hours under state and federal laws. But in some cases, facility officials are not deeming staff deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic as work-related, so they are not reporting them. It’s a pattern that has emerged across the nation, according to a Kaiser Health News review of hundreds of worker deaths detailed by family members, colleagues and local, state and federal records.

Workplace safety regulators have taken a lenient stance toward employers during the pandemic, giving them broad discretion to decide internally whether to report worker deaths. As a result, scores of deaths were not reported to occupational safety officials from the earliest days of the pandemic through late October.

Kaiser Health News examined more than 240 deaths of healthcare workers profiled for the Lost on the Frontline project and found that employers did not report more than one-third of them to a state or federal OSHA office, many based on internal decisions that the deaths were not work-related — conclusions that were not independently reviewed.

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