Image: APA/BARBARA GINDL
The “Salzburger Nachrichten” reported on this on Tuesday. It was not only in the difficult to compare corona years 2021 and 2020 that there were significantly fewer cases with 4.5 and 3.9 million respectively. Compared to 2018 (5.0 million cases) and 2019 (5.1 million), this was an increase of around 20 percent.
And the trend is still rising: this year there were already 1.5 million cases by mid-March. The numbers for 2022 are also higher than in previous years when summed up by days of sick leave: 77.3 million days of sick leave came together, compared to 68 million the year before. In the last few weeks, the ÖGK had already reported several times about high sick leave rates as a result of a stronger flu wave than in the Corona years. But it is not only the sharp increase in respiratory infections that has caused sick leave to rise, the corona numbers are also still contributing to this.
The data only includes dependent employees insured with the ÖGK, but this is the vast majority at over 80 percent of all insured persons. The data for all insured persons, including civil servants, the self-employed and farmers for 2022, will only be available towards the end of the year with the absenteeism report drawn up by the economic research institute on behalf of the social security funds. Wifo expert Benjamin Bittschi sees no long-term trend in the now published ÖGK numbers and points out that the number of sick leave days per employee has been stagnating for years.
Source: Nachrichten
