Are Germany's getting sicker... or lazier?

A record umber of people called in sick last year. Does this bode badly for Germany's modern work ethic?

Photo by Shane on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

For the last two years, Germans have suddenly been getting a lot more sick. Or, I should say, they’ve been calling in sick a lot more often.

In 2022, the number of sick days people took shot up to around twenty two. That is over four weeks in which people were apparently lying in bed.

While that number had been slowly creeping up for years (from around 12 sick days per annum in 2008 to 18 in 2021) the figure for 2022 marked a very sudden leap.

These figures are collected by health insurance companies and then averaged out by the National Association of Health Insurers. While I haven’t seen the overall average for last year, figures released by some of Germany’s main health insurers suggest that the number may have gone even higher.

The obvious thing to remark about this spike is that it took place after the Covid pandemic.

Intuitively, one would expect the number of people calling in sick to have surged in 2020 as Covid swept through an unvaccinated po…