In early January, 88,000 people in the U.S. were infected with the new coronavirus or were out of work in the U.S. to care for someone infected, while more people said they had to work while they were sick. The Wall Street Journal reported."
The current wave of injuries, driven by the Omicron variant, is weighing on the U.S. workforce, as employers struggle with such absences in an already struggling labor market, with fewer workers and wage increases amid the highest inflation in four decades.
According to a survey by the U.S. Census Bureau in early January, nearly 8.8 million people were unemployed, the highest number since absenteeism began in mid-2020, surpassing the 6.6 million recorded in January 2021 and three million in December.
The number of people who reported not working because of concern about contracting or spreading the coronavirus rose to 3.2 million in the January survey from 2.6 million in December.
A separate survey, conducted by the "Shift" Project at Harvard's Kennedy School, found that nearly two-thirds of workers who reported getting sick in the last month during the survey period said they worked while they were sick,
The survey included 6,600 hourly workers, whose opinions were polled from September to November.
Affected workers stated that financial reasons were the main reason for their work during the illness, followed by unwillingness to let down their co-workers, and fear of reprisals.
Sick workers, who do not have sick leave, must decide whether to work and get paid or stay at home and reduce the risk of others getting sick.
"Both high levels of absenteeism and people who work while ill during the pandemic may impact the economy in the near term,"the paper quotes economists as saying.
"Employees in companies with few employees are under pressure, both financially and from co-workers and managers, to continue working even in the event of illness, and absenteeism from production lines and restaurants threatens to further disrupt the economy,"she notes.
About three-quarters of private sector workers receive some form of paid sick leave in the United States, according to the Labor Department, a share that has risen slightly since before the pandemic. But in the service sector, which includes restaurants and retail centers where personal contact is high, more than 40 percent of workers do not have paid sick leave.
Courtney DeCosta, of New Hampshire, said she was not paid from her job at a medical records management company in December while she was quarantined for covid-19, noting that she had symptoms, "if I had been asymptomatic I would have gone to work so I wouldn't lose money".
It was the second time the 33-year-old project manager had isolated herself during the pandemic, and the first was last March because she was in close contact with an infected person, and she was paid for the period, but by December, she had used her three paid sick days for the year and lost about a quarter of her income per month.
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