John Holguin worked as a corrections officer for the City of Henderson, Nevada, for eleven years. Holguin contracted COVID-19 in June 2021 after close contact with an ill coworker. He was hospitalized twice; once for initial treatment and again for a 23-day inpatient stay involving hypoxia, pneumonia, and persistent respiratory impairment. He filed a workers’ compensation claim for occupational lung disease, and his treating physician confirmed that his COVID-19 infection constituted a disease of the lungs. The City’s insurer denied the claim. Holguin appealed administratively, and the appeals officer affirmed the denial. The district court upheld that decision, and Holguin sought review in the Nevada Supreme Court.
The core dispute centered on the proper interpretation of Nevada Revised Statutes § 617.455, which governs occupational lung-disease claims by firefighters, arson investigators, and police officers — including correctional officers. Subsection (1) provides that lung disease is compensable only if it is “caused by exposure to heat, smoke, fumes, tear gas or any other noxious gases,” and that such exposure arises out of and in the course of employment. Subsection (5), added by amendment, states that when a qualifying officer with at least two years of continuous service becomes disabled by lung disease, the disease is “conclusively presumed” to have arisen out of and in the course of employment. Holguin argued that Subsection (5) created a stand-alone basis for compensation — that is, once a lung disease is diagnosed and the length-of-service requirement is met, the presumption eliminates any need to show a causal link to noxious-gas exposure. Under his reading, Subsection (5) fully supplanted Subsection (1)’s causation requirement for qualified officers.
The Nevada Supreme Court rejected that interpretation. The Court emphasized that the plain text of § 617.455 must be read as a unified statutory scheme. Subsection (1) imposes two causal requirements: (1) the disease must be caused by exposure to specific types of noxious agents; and (2) that exposure must arise out of and in the course of employment.
Subsection (5) eliminates only the second requirement by conclusively presuming the “arising out of employment” component, but it does not eliminate the first requirement concerning the type of exposure. The Court explained that although Holguin established that he had a disabling lung disease and satisfied the employment-tenure requirement, no provision in § 617.455 allowed the Court to treat contagious disease exposure as equivalent to exposure to noxious gases.
The Court therefore affirmed the judgment, holding that a qualifying officer must satisfy both statutory components: the conclusive presumption as to arising-out-of-employment, and separate proof that the lung disease was caused by the type of exposure enumerated in Subsection (1).
Holguin v. City of Henderson, 2025 WL 6692365 (Nev. Supreme Ct., Nov. 14, 2025).