More people called out sick in April than at any time on record. Was it COVID-19?
When the novel coronavirus planted its feet firmly in American soil around March, the amount of people calling out sick from work grew to the highest number since at least 1976, according to new research, suggesting the number of COVID-19 cases is far greater than reported.
More than 2 million employees were absent from work for illness or injury in mid-April this year — coinciding with peak coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths — and the majority were immigrant workers, a group that comprises many essential workers at high risk of viral exposure, the study published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine said.
“I’ve seen firsthand COVID-19’s impact on the critically ill patients in our ICU, and we’ve known that many more were also ill at home,” study lead author Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance, said in a news release. “But our study indicates that the pandemic has sickened many more people than we had realized, especially vulnerable employees like immigrants.”
The researchers analyzed employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau and compared trends over the first four months of 2019 and 2020, according to the study. The team also noted the number of people out sick each month since 1976 — the earliest year such data is available.
The first two months of 2019 and 2020 had about the same number of employees absent from work for health-related reasons, but as April rolled in, the numbers differed drastically.
There were 1.1 million more workers out sick in a single week in April this year than last, according to the study; that’s five times greater than the number of COVID-19 cases diagnosed that week.
Immigrants, workers over 55 years old and employees without a college education called out sick from work more than any other demographic, the researchers found.
Despite a lack of nationwide data on demographics of hospitalized COVID-19 patients, the researchers said their findings are consistent with local statistics that show racial minorities are more affected by the disease.
Some reasons behind the work absences include the inability of low-income workers to work remotely and the possibility that the anxiety surrounding a pandemic caused people to stay home out of caution.
The researchers noted they did not have access to data on what illnesses caused the absences, so some respondents who reported being sick might have been doing something else, such as taking care of their child.
But because the data focused on one week in April, “the figures likely understate the number of jobholders who were out sick during the course of the month,” the researchers said.
This story was originally published July 28, 2020 at 5:45 PM with the headline "More people called out sick in April than at any time on record. Was it COVID-19?."
