More than 2 million employees in the United States missed work due to illness in mid-April this year. This is the highest number on record.
This increase does coincide with the surge in COVID-19 but suggests that the number of cases may be higher than officials initially reported.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an undeniable impact on the way we work. More people than ever before have shifted to working from home, while for others, the pandemic has meant working in challenging conditions or job loss.
In fact, in many parts of the world, the pandemic has created an unemployment crisis. In the United States, for example, the unemployment rate for April reached 14.7%, compared with 4.4% in March. This is the highest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The pandemic has also brought into focus the need for paid sick leave. Almost a quarter of U.S. civilian workers do not have access to paid sick leave, putting people with COVID-19 symptoms in a near-impossible situation.
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Although the Families First Coronavirus Response Act has helped with this, not every employee is eligible, and many will continue to experience adverse economic impacts from the pandemic.
New research in JAMA Internal Medicine sought to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. workforce.
The study authors — who are physicians from Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, and the City University of New York’s Hunter College — analyzed employee absences in the first 4 months of 2020, when COVID-19 was beginning to spread through the country.
They found that in mid-April 2020, over 1.5% of the workforce (more than 2 million people) were off sick. This is almost triple the percentage for the same period in 2019.
The study authors used information from the Current Population Survey, which is a monthly survey of people in employment in the U.S.
They looked at how many people reported being “out sick” — that is, being absent from work due to illness, injury, or other medical problems — from January to April 2019 and over the same period in 2020.
They found that i