After more than 1,000 people died from cases of coronavirus traced back to transmission in their workplaces, the Trump Administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration failed to follow up on the cases to ensure the companies were following virus mitigation guidelines, the Wall Street Journal reports.

From February 2020 through January 2021, workplace complaints jumped 76% from the previous 12 months.  Of the 93,000 complaints received during that time, 56,000 of them related to the coronavirus.  OSHA only investigated 12% of cases (11,000) over that time, versus 32% of cases (18,000) from the previous year.

The cases that were not investigated included more than 1,000 cases where a worker died from coronavirus likely picked up in the workplace.  The Journal also found 180 worker deaths from COVID-19 that occurred four weeks or more after complaints to OSHA agencies that the agencies didn’t investigate beyond corresponding with employers.

Early in the pandemic, OSHA told employers they were not required to report cases of coronavirus transmission in the workplace.  That position gradually changed after media reports of massive outbreaks in places like meat processing plants where the majority of workers became infected and community cases were directly linked to the plants.

After being contacted by the Journal, some employers said they didn’t report the fatalities because it was impossible to definitively track the infection of the individual to the workplace, even though the workplace was the apparent nexus of community spread in a region.

Some state-level occupational safety agencies reported that they didn’t investigate cases because there were no guidelines on a state or federal level to trigger an investigation.  Utah’s state agency, for example, said the state didn’t pass actionable regulations until November.