I have it from people who have seen the policy that the NFHS liability insurance for high school officials was changed on July 1. The change eliminated coverage for any claims against officials related to viruses, germs, etc. I don't know how many states use the NFHS policy to insure their officials. This means that any official who is sued for allegedly doing or failing to do something wrong that involves Covid-19 is not covered by insurance. The problem is not only whether a referee would actually have to write a check (court judgement or settlement) but also that they would have to pay for their lawyer out of pocket as well. Typically, just getting sued and obtaining a lawyer who gets the case dismissed immediately will, at least in my state, run $10,000 to $15,000. Triple that if you have to go to trial. I have informed my assignor that I cannot afford that exposure, so I will not being doing high school games until we have adequate insurance. I am told that USSF's policy now also excludes coverage for Covid-19 related suits.
I know at least some states have passed laws or have administrative decrees that prevent an individual suing a business over COVID-19. So if you go to a restaurant and come down with COVID you can't sue the restaurant owner/staff for infecting you. What I don't know is if a statute like that could be extended to contract employees like referees.
Well in a situation like this I'm glad to know there is such an unambigous demarcation of duties between officials and site managers /s
I *suspect* that, as with many kinds of policies, the Ins Co interpretation of the old policy was also that it would not cover a COVID scenario, and that (from the Ins Co perspective) they were just tweaking the language to make more clear what they believe was always true. It must be a good time to be an insurance litigator, as there is going to be a lot of it on a wide variety of policies before this is over.
I just hope one of the 5,000 lawyer/soccer referees in my local association would take the case pro bono if anything like that happened to me.
Since I was in the media business for all of my working career, I went to the source, which is Dissenger Reed Insurance of Overland Kansas who handles the policy for NFHS. Here is there response to my inquiry. “The NFHS Officials General Liability coverage is intended to cover Bodily Injury, Property Damage and Personal/Advertising brought on by 3rd party litigation. This specific General Liability insurance does not apply to "bodily injury" or "personal and advertising injury" caused or alleged to have been caused by a communicable disease. As you can imagine, it is impossible to pinpoint the exact timing of when an Official or participant contracts the virus/communicable disease or to show the specific covered event was the location in question. On the accident injury side, our NFHS Officials Accident Medical policy provides coverage for only those athletic-related injuries during a covered event. COVID19 is considered a sickness claim and excluded within all accident medical policies across the country.“
I agree with your sentiment but this should come as no shock to anyone. Pretty much every organization and state has done everything possible to shield companies from having any liability with regard to covid. You would almost have to prove gross negligence before they would be liable. Which still means having a lawyer to get you there.