The Possibility of Recognizing Covid-19 as a Labor Accident in Brazil: Analysis of the Understanding of the Federal Supreme Court

Abstract

The paper investigates in which circumstances the contamination by the new coronavirus can be considered as an accident at work in Brazil, generating the legal effects resulting from this equation. The deductive method was used, as a method of approach, for the central bibliographic research of the present work combined with the method of qualitative analysis procedure for the study of judgments. The research was subdivided into: the study of the concept of typical work accident provided for in the caput of article 19 of Law n. 8.213/1991 and the hypotheses of labor accident by equivalence provided for in articles 20 and 21 of the same Law, among them, the occupational disease genre and its two species: occupational disease and occupational disease; the decision of the Federal Supreme Court handed down on the occasion of the judgment of Direct Actions of unconstitutionality n. 6342, 6344, 6345, 6346, 6348, 6349 and 6352, which determined the suspension of the effectiveness of article 29 of Provisional Measure 927/2020, which limited the possibility of recognizing covid-19 as an occupational disease, except upon proof of the causal link ; Finally, the practical effect of the aforementioned decision was observed, using the dialectical method based on the qualitative study of two judicial processes of great national repercussion, as a result of the research, it was mapped that in only one of the cases covid-19 was equated with the work accident., in this way the understanding of the causal nexus is an essential element for this configuration.