Aug. 24 (UPI) — More people are off work in the United States due to sickness Aug. 24 than any other day of the year, including during the cold and flu season in the depths of winter, according to analysis by a leave management software provider.
America’s second “sickest day” was Feb. 13, which was the Monday after Super Bowl LVII for the 2022 season, Flamingo said in a blog post, though it did find February was the sickest month with businesses across the country seeing, on average, 10% of their workforce taking sick leave.
And Valentine’s Day comes up right afterward.
“Beyond just a single day, we discovered that February has been the ‘sickest’ month over the past five years, with April and December close behind,” said Flamingo adding that stomach bugs were the number one reason employees stayed home sick.
More than half of sick leave, 54%, was due to GI symptoms variously reported as “stomach bug,” “diarrhea,” or “vomiting,” and far exceeding COVID-19, which accounted for only 25% of absences.
Anxiety or stress-related conditions represented 9% of sick leave, while musculoskeletal injuries and bone fractures caused 6% of absences.
When it came to reporting sickness, Flamingo found that a majority of employees preferred to avoid awkward phone calls with their boss, with two-thirds opting to let their line managers know they were staying off work via text, WhatsApp, Slack or email. A very small percentage simply didn’t let their employer know at all.
The facts around sick leave are notoriously problematic, with patterns difficult to tease out, experts said. So while more than a quarter of Americans, for example, did not take a single sick leave day in 2022, 10 million of the country’s 135 million workers took more than 20 days off, accounting for a huge share of total sick leave.