Is the Free State too strict when police officers want corona infections to be recognized as an accident at work? This question has been debated since last year. The state associations of the police unions DPolG and GdP advise officials who may have caught the virus in connection with their job to identify an accident at work.
They are concerned with possible long-term damage that is not foreseeable now. If an accident at work is not documented as such, but a civil servant later has problems or even early retirement is pending, then it is about adequate care. In contrast to some other countries, of the dozen applications submitted in Bavaria, apparently not a single one has yet been approved. Several lawsuits are pending before the courts. The SPD in the state parliament blames the regulations for quota zero and introduced a bill to the state parliament on Wednesday.
“In a global pandemic, the police hold their heads for us and afterwards we bureaucratically talk our way out of the fact that no one can prove that they were really infected with Corona while on duty,” said the SPD interior expert Stefan Schuster in the debate. This is “a poor certificate”, the police feel “just let down”. So that applications are no longer rejected “cold-heartedly and bureaucratically”, an amendment to the Civil Service Providers Act is necessary. Covid-19 is to be inserted there with the passage that a work accident has occurred if the police officer was “particularly exposed” to the risk of corona infection in his professional activity – unless, conversely, an infection outside of the service is “clearly detectable”.
Accidents at work would be “checked very precisely and intensively”
Most of the applications submitted to the State Office for Finance were rejected, and some are still being processed. According to information from ministries, the SPD spoke of 79 applications, the CSU in the state parliament called the number of 158 on Wednesday. At the state office in the spring, at the request of the SZ, it was said that potential accidents at work are “highly precisely and intensively checked” according to the Civil Service Providers Act, it is also possible about “causal relationships”. There must be “a special causal connection” between infection, business activity and illness – for example, if someone infected willingly spit on an officer.
Conceivable infections, for example at the police station, during courses or during sports, were, however, part of the “general danger for everyone” in a pandemic situation. Numerous cases of infection in 2020 are said to go back to a sports course in Eichstätt. In other federal states, a more general approach is emerging. For example, Schleswig-Holstein’s state police approved all 23 applications that had been processed to date for recognition as an occupational accident.
Wolfgang Fackler (CSU) pointed out in the state parliament that “Corona can be infected anywhere. The virus is invisible and unpredictable”. The state office is examining evidence of infection within the service, and the state can then also be expected to be responsible. The draft law is “impractical”. Anna Schwamberger (Greens) called the recognition practice a “shame”, Markus Bayerbach (AfD) refused to “play off social groups against each other”. Gerald Pittner from the coalition partner Free Voters at least praised the direction of the draft, and Wolfgang Heubisch (FDP) also wants to seriously discuss the proposal to facilitate evidence. It is now to be dealt with by the Public Service Committee.