According to the AOK, Bavarian employees called in sick more often last year than they have in almost 30 years. The causes were corona and respiratory infections, as the largest German health insurance company reported on Tuesday. On average, the sick leave of the almost 2.8 million employees insured with the Bavarian AOK was 6.1 percent – the highest value since 1995.
Apart from this rate, significantly more people were on sick leave over the course of the year than in the previous year: while in 2021 more than half of the working AOK members did not call in sick at all, in 2022 those who were continuously healthy from the beginning to the end of the year were in the minority: 61.8 percent reported sick, in the previous year it was only 46.2 percent.
The main cause was respiratory infections, the number of which skyrocketed: 42.6 percent of employees called in sick because of this, more than twice as high as in 2021. In the third year of the pandemic alone, the AOK counted 498,000 Covid infections, almost a fifth of them The insured contracted the corona pathogen once or several times. That was almost five times as many as in 2021, when the AOK only reported a good 100,000 corona cases among its insured in Bavaria.
Muscle and skeletal disorders are usually at the forefront of sick leave statistics, including back pain, tendonitis and knee problems. In 2022, according to the AOK, respiratory infections were by far the most common cause of sick leave. There is traditionally a clear north-south divide within the Free State. In 2022, sick leave was again highest in Upper Franconia at 7.3 percent, and lowest at 5.3 percent in Upper Bavaria. This is reflected in the districts: Kronach was at the top with 8.3 percent, the residents of the district of Munich were the healthiest with a sickness rate of 4.7 percent. In a comparison of the healthiest federal states, Bavaria was third behind Hamburg and Berlin – in 2021 it was still first.