Share of German employees on sick leave hits record high in March

Source: Xinhua | 2020-05-27

At 6.84 percent, the share of employees in Germany who called in sick in March was at its highest level in 20 years, the country's statutory health insurance fund Techniker Krankenkasse (TK) announced on Tuesday.

The figure for the previous year was only 5.30 percent, according to TK's evaluation of its data on insured citizens.

"We assume that a large share of the above-average sickness rate can be explained by preventive sickness notifications due to the coronavirus pandemic," said Jens Baas, chairperson of the TK's board of directors.

German employees had followed the official recommendation to "stay at home in case of showing symptoms of a cold in order not to endanger others," explained Baas, adding that every two years there was a "strong flue wave" in Germany, leading to a high number of people calling in sick.

According to the TK, COVID-19 played "only a minor role" in the figures because only around 3,000 of the almost 900,000 cases of sickness reported in March were coded with the COVID-19 diagnosis.

Meanwhile, Germany's health insurance funds expect to see a drop in revenues because of the coronavirus crisis.

"For 2020, we expect a reduction in revenues in the statutory health insurance system of 4.8 billion euros," Ulrike Elsner, chair of the board of the Association of Substitute Health Insurance Funds (vdek) told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Monday.