Everyone, Everywhere

All at once. Is sick

You hear it on the train, in the supermarket, see it on the street, in your friends, your family, yourself maybe. The persistent cough, the runny nose, the general offness that seems to characterise a lot of us these days. If like me you have that nagging feeling everyone is sick a lot more but weren’t sure if it was just confirmation bias or something more concrete, well, you were right.

Ok, fine. Not everyone and not everywhere and not all at once, of course. That’s just the headline writer in me. But a substantial number of people are more sick now than they ever used to be. And it’s due to covid. Let’s go through it. Bear in mind this can’t be the full picture. There is only one of me, I speak one and-a-half languages and have limited time. But this is what I found from a few hours research and DeepL translate.

The UK is the sick man of Europe once again, this time literally. The number of Brits off work due to long-term sickness is at record levels, up nearly 8% on a year ago at 2.52 million people.

It’s the same story in the US, where each month in the past three years more than a million people have called out sick. In June 2022 the CDC estimated about 7% of adult Americans had long covid.

In Australia the government estimates 12% of people are absent from work due to long covid. Australia’s treasurer Jim Chalmers said that “covid is having a long-term impact on the productivity of our workforce.” Not enough for them to put in place any safety measures or stop mass infection though.

Last week Spain’s central bank warned that more people are out of the Spanish workforce due to illness than ever before and they explicitly linked this to the “predictions about covid sequalae.”

Record sick leave puts strain on German economy. This was a headline in the German media last week and speaks for itself.

In Italy there has “been a boom in sick leave certificates.” In the second half of 2022, sick leave in Italy increased 30.4% in the private sector and 28.4% in the public sector compared to the second half of 2021. 78.6 million days of work were lost in 6 months.

Work absenteeism due to illness reached an all-time high in The Netherlands in 2022. One of the country’s main health insurers - Nationale Nederlanden - reported the same trend.

In Canada, a record number of hours of work were lost in 2022 due to illness. Economists at CIBC capital markets explicitly linked it to covid in a January report. “Unfortunately, illness-related absenteeism…appears to have worsened in 2022 due to the continued circulation of COVID in the community and the resurgence of other illnesses. More than 0.4 more hours per employee were lost in Q4 2022 compared to the average seen in 2017-19.”

In Sweden the cost of illness due to missed days at work has more than doubled in a year. Long-term sick leave in Sweden cost society SEK 71 billion last year, according to insurers Skandia. Last year, the cost amounted to SEK 32.6 billion

In Poland a record 289 million days of sick leave were recorded in 2022.

A few caveats here: not all countries collect this data and if they do it can be hard to find. It was hard enough to find for some of these countries. Some countries haven’t yet updated for 2022, so I’ll keep an eye on that. And who knows what’s going on in Russia or even China for that matter? Who knows what’s going on in war zones or countries afflicted by major political-economic turmoil where collecting this data isn’t really a possibility? There’s no reason to think anywhere that has given in to mass covid infection has dodged this. Perhaps one of the few countries that has is Cuba, a highly effective homemade vaccine and limited international tourism means it is now one of the healthiest countries around with very little circulating covid. As a result, the average Cuban can now expect to live nearly three years longer than the average American.

As we get sicker, most governments are going to have absolutely no sympathy. Look at the UK. Rather than respond with any compassion or understanding, the government is trying to make it harder for doctors to sign people off sick from work. They want you producing, and they want you consuming. And they absolutely will funnel you into an early grave to ensure you spend most of your life doing that.

Mostly though, governments are ignoring it, hoping it will miraculously go away. Or hoping we’ll all somehow acquire bat immune systems and truly be able to live with the virus. There is no plan.

Bigger picture, what does this mean? Well it can’t mean anything good. It doesn’t mean we’re all going to be super-immune to every virus going. That’s not how it works. Because we’re not bats (who are able to host an astonishing amount of viruses in their bodies without harm). Quite the opposite in fact. Viruses weaken humans, and in the case of covid, knock down your immune system significantly for who knows how long. Months, years? We don’t know. But this is what covid does, leaving us open to opportunistic infections that a decent immune system would have fought off more easily. Stanford medical school researchers recently said covid is “akin to HIV” and has not magically transformed into the common cold. And what is repeated exposure to a Sars virus akin to HIV - for which humans can never have long-term immunity - going to do to the kids? We don’t know. It’s an incredibly reckless experiment.

The other point here is that we’re not going back to a time of virus “season.” Covid is the granddaddy. It is the super-circulator, the “seasonal” virus that can produce a peak case load in spring, summer, autumn, or winter. The one that raises your risk of all sorts of other ailments including possibly cancer, even in cases where your symptoms are mild in the acute phase.

One way to sum up where we are with covid in 2023 is that businesses, governments, their experts and the media desperately wanted and needed vaccines to turn a Sars virus into the common cold, and no one is prepared to deal with the possibility they didn’t. And nothing suggests they did.

With a de facto blackout on covid due to the elimination of testing and reporting, it will be much harder to assess the ongoing effects of the virus, but sickness from work will be a key one. As will excess deaths and life expectancy, which have both trended significantly up and down, respectively, in the last two years.

The future is sicker. That’s unavoidable now. Mass infection with a Sars virus will do that. It just will. This isn’t doomism, it’s biology. How much sicker we don’t yet know. And whether it is reversible really depends on whether people can organise to make revolutionary change. Somewhere, somehow, maybe someone will show us the way. Prior to the revolution, we have to demand clean air and sensible indoor mask policies, healthcare settings at a minimum. But to expect this system to make the changes needed to help us get better? Now that’s doomism.

Thanks and stay safe.

(Artwork by @ronniefurbear on IG)