Workers are putting in fewer hours than before the pandemic around the world as the number of sick days surge, according to a new global report. The Telegraph has the story.
People are clocking in fewer hours on average in all countries apart from those with low incomes, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), after a “significant” rise in sick days.
Sick days in the U.K. rose by 36% between 2019 and 2022, according to the report. A record 185.6 million working days were lost because of sickness or injury in 2022, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has previously said.
A surge in ill health has been blamed on long waiting lists for NHS treatment and a rise in mental health issues post-pandemic, as well as back problems.
The ILO report shows the issues are not unique to Britain. In Germany, working days lost to ill health rose by 38% between 2019 and 2022, while sick days surged by 72% in Estonia.
Deteriorating health could be behind the fall in average working hours globally, the ILO said, blaming ageing populations and long-term impacts from Covid.The report said: “Long Covid, affecting around 20% of those infected by the virus, according to the World Health Organisation, may be having a significant impact on activity measures of labour markets.”
Workers in some sectors like healthcare have reduced their hours after suffering from stress and burnout during the pandemic, the ILO said.
The agency added that the impact of pandemic-era policies such as furlough were “fading only slowly and have prevented a faster recovery of average hours worked”.
Lingering effects of furlough are keeping people attached to jobs, with people sticking with their employers regardless of how many working hours they are offered.

Long Covid or Long Vaccine?
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The scamdemic lockdowns gave them an inch, now they are taking a yard!
Being able to do what you wish when you like will never be conducive with a strong work ethic! Blame whichever illness or pandemic you like, it’s just that, a bone idle excuse for doing f-all and still getting paid
Plays right into the hands of those who propose a UBI and the social credit control state. I think people even with just the sniffles, who used to go to work when afflicted, now stay at home. That’s thanks to Covid nonsense of anyone with a mere drip at the end of their nose being declared a potential murderous granny killer. Covid has changed our society irrevocably to one where common sense about normal winter ailments has disappeared and that effing mantra of ‘stay safe’ abounds!!
Hang on, this graph indicates that workers in the UK used take a mere 4 days off, whereas the Norwegians took over 3 weeks a year sick??? And the Germans 11 days?? WTF? So much for the UK being a nation of skivers.
The devil will be in the detail: how is the base data defined and how is it manipulated? What is effect of labour laws in each country and zero hours contracts?? Etc.
Absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the toxic gene therapies which basically trash the immune system over time.
I’ll bet that the incidence of sick days – obviously caused by long govid, is highest amongst Guardian readers and avid BBC watchers.
So, is it reading the Guardian and/or watching the BBC that causes these problems and/or the fact that they’re more likely to be highly jabbed…
I recall that there was research which showed that a significant proportion of Long Covid sufferers had, er, never had covid.
What a surprise. Who’d have thought that people might change their attitude to relatively minor illnesses after the scamdemic? Historically, I probably acquired most of the “common colds” (and transmitted a few) at work, when it was not the norm to take a couple of days off sick with things like that. Of course, some might say that this is a good improvement, but then they should be prepared to shell out for the consequences.
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/06/councils-undemocratic-pledges-beat-governments-net-zero/
Councils agreeing to Nut Zero before 2050 and with NO mandate – 160 of them.
Has your local council signed up with UK100?
If yours is on this list, it has anti-democratically pledged to put the Net Zero agenda before voters’ wishes & the public’s interest
See our research in Telegraph here: https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/06/councils-undemocratic-pledges-beat-governments-net-zero/
…
The council of the place we live is on this list.
Best wishes
Mike
What the heck is this?? I smell maximum garbage here, with a large side helping of scapegoating of this benign drug. HCQ is an exceedingly safe drug, safe enough to even use in pregnancy, as far as I’m aware. I wonder what the likes of experts such as Drs Kory and McCullough say about this;
”The use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine in the first months of the Covid pandemic may have cost the lives of some 200 patients in the Netherlands, according to new research
Calculations by a French team of scientists show the side effects of the drug killed at least 17,000 people worldwide. The real number is probably higher because of “incomplete data from most countries”, the researchers said.
It is not clear exactly how many people died from the side effects of the drug in the Netherlands, microbiologist and doctor Marc Bonten told the Volkskrant. Some 10,000 seriously ill patients were treated with the drug of whom some 2,000 died. Around 200 would have have survived without the drug, he said.”
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/01/antimalarial-drug-killed-some-200-covid-patients-in-nl-study/
IIRC, in some of these trials with HCL they used several multiples of the usual therapeutic dose, which was bound to cause issues because the safe dose range is not so wide. Why would you do that, unless you were designing the trial to fail. The last couple of paras make it clear it is a hit piece against the pesky antivaxxers. As usual, the devil is in the detail. Or in this case, the lack of detail.
For a country’s productivity and thus long-term economic health, officials and business leaders need to figure out why employees’ physical health seems to be deteriorating, as indicated by the increase in sick days taken. Possible reasons for this increase include 1) Malingerers and those used to being at home during the workweek, 2) People with hacking colds more considerate of their fellow workers, 3) People with minor colds shamed into staying home, 4) Employees’ compromised immune systems from the jabs, 5) Employees taking time off to care for children/family members with compromised immune systems. If Long Covid is more associated with the jabs than with Covid infection itself, then that’s a subset of 4) and 5?. Children’s compromised immune systems could be associated with the lockdowns. Fewer/no medical visits during the lockdowns could also have caused this current bout of sickness/ill health.
Here’s another indicator that people may be more sick than in the past: Blood shortages. The Red Cross is reporting fewer people are donating and there’s an urgent need for blood. I’ve seen comments that the Red Cross always says that. When I donated blood today, I said that to the man sitting next to me. He said, no, his daughter is a nurse and they haven’t seen shortages this bad. Turns out that the 50-ish man couldn’t donate blood today because his hemoglobin was low. Nosy that I am, I researched causes and cancer is the most serious. While there, I was desperately trying to overhear whether the techs ask men whether they’ve been pregnant like they ask the women!
A triple-jabbed friend got Covid (again) on the run-up to Christmas. It’s taken her 4 weeks to get over it … this time.
It would be interesting to see data on the number of sick days taken by the jabbed+boosted and the number taken by the un-jabbed.
Long Covid or Long Vaccine?
No.
Laziness!
This doesn’t really make sense – as per the graph above, obviously people in different countries had hugely different tendencies to take sick days pre-covid anyway (much bigger differences than the increases we are now seeing) – but if the increase is, as we are told, due to everyone having Long Covid or stress, then why are people in Ireland only 3% more stressed and ill whereas in the UK as a whole it’s 36%? I know % can be misleading but if they are basing this whole analysis on % increase then surely they need to explain the difference in effect. IMO they can’t blame the NHS either since countries without an NHS (ie everywhere else) are seeing the same effect.
Also everyone in Sweden should have Long Covid and trauma ++ since they didn’t lock down, so why such a small increase there?