Stony Brook employee with long COVID wins $1M over work-from-home denial

A Nassau jury awarded an employee of the Stony Brook University Hospital Blood Donor Center nearly $1 million after the blood bank refused her request to primarily work from home due to persistent fatigue from long COVID.

Stony Brook had argued in court documents that Donna Mirabella, 57, of Roslyn, could not perform her duties as technical associate director if she worked remotely, but the jury concluded that she could.

Mirabella said in a text message through her lawyer that she felt “validated” by the verdict “because my request was legitimate, that I wasn’t asking for something unreasonable”

She had filed suit under state human rights law, alleging discrimination on the basis of disability. Long COVID encompasses a range of symptoms and conditions that continue for at least three months after a COVID-19 infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The type of symptoms, which in some cases are debilitating, vary by person; fatigue is one of the most common.

Mirabella’s Manhattan attorney, Perry Friedman, said he hoped the November verdict sends a message to employers of people with long COVID, and with any other disability, “to be a little more understanding with the accommodation of being able to work remotely.”

The office of state Attorney General Letitia James, which is defending Stony Brook, a state institution, referred Newsday to Stony Brook University Hospital for comment. The hospital said in a statement it is “unable to comment on specific litigation.”

In January, the hospital asked Nassau County Supreme Court Judge Philippe Solages Jr. to set aside the jury verdict, arguing in a court memorandum that it was “irrational.”

In awarding $954,000, the jury concluded that Stony Brook had not proved that the accommodation would “impose an undue hardship on the blood bank,” according to court records. Stony Brook contested that finding.

An employer is not required under state law to make accommodations for an employee if it is an “undue hardship.”

But Stony Brook said in court documents that when Mirabella had worked remotely, other employees had to perform some of her on-site tasks.

Stony Brook also said Mirabella had requested 100% remote work. Friedman said Mirabella initially asked for fully remote work, and her doctor recommended it. But she later proposed a compromise in which she would have worked one 10-hour day a week at the blood center and three 10-hour days at home, and she would go to the blood center on other days if necessary.

Mirabella and many other blood bank employees had worked remotely from March 2020 until November 2021 as part of early pandemic restrictions, her December 2023 lawsuit states.

Mirabella contracted COVID-19 in December 2021, and was later diagnosed with long COVID. After she took several weeks of sick leave, Stony Brook agreed to allow her to work remotely until June 2022 but said that in-person work would be phased in, and that she would return to her four 10-hour on-site workdays by mid-July 2022, a date the hospital later extended to September 2022, court documents state.

Mirabella was able to handle one in-person day per week, but working two days on site “didn’t give her enough recovery time, because she needed three days to recover” from exhaustion before returning to the blood center, Friedman said.

“If there ever was a need for her to come in on a day she wasn’t scheduled to, she’d go in,” he said. 

When Mirabella worked from home, she completed her full 10 hours of work, but sometimes with rest breaks, Friedman said. She also did not have the multiple on-site distractions that added to her exhaustion, Friedman said.

"She was always able to perform her job," he said.

Mirabella went on paid medical leave from September 2022 to September 2023 and has been on unpaid leave since then, court documents state.

Mirabella said in a text via Friedman that her condition remains roughly the same. She is not currently employed elsewhere.

Millions of Americans have long COVID, although studies differ in estimating the number.

Scientists with the Recover Initiative, which the federal government created to research long COVID, estimated in July that 10-26% of adults and 4% of children developed long COVID at some point between 2020 and 2024. Many people eventually recover.

The verdict in Mirabella’s case came three months after a Manhattan jury awarded $4.025 million to a Nassau eye doctor after NYU Langone and the NYU Grossman School of Medicine refused to let him work from home despite his COVID-19-related disability, according to court documents. NYU made an argument similar to Stony Brook’s: That the doctor was not able to fulfill his duties working remotely.

A U.S. district judge in November reduced the award amount to $2.55 million and in January removed two NYU employees from the judgment.

By David Olson

david.olson@newsday.com@DavidOlson11

David Olson covers health care. He has worked at Newsday since 2015 and previously covered immigration, multicultural issues and religion at The Press-Enterprise in Southern California.