People with long-term consequences of a corona infection are in the past year a report According to the Techniker Krankenkasse (TK), they were on sick leave for an average of 105 days. In relation to the total number of people in employment, long-Covid only accounts for a relatively small proportion of the total sick leave, according to the health report presented in Berlin.
The basis for the special evaluation of the longer-term consequences of a corona infection was the data from 4,278,610 TK-insured workers aged 15 to 64. The symptoms of Long-Covid range from limited resilience and extreme tiredness to shortness of breath and headaches to muscle and joint pain. “Anyone affected by Long-Covid has had to deal with this disease for a long time – which still puzzles us,” says TK CEO Jens Baas. The number of those affected appears to be relatively small. “But these are only the patients who have also been on sick leave with this specific diagnosis – we also assume that there is a high number of unreported cases.”
According to the TK report, long-Covid sufferers with a mild course of a corona infection were on sick leave for an average of 90 days in 2021. Affected people who were in hospital for more than seven days because of their corona infection were on average 168 days sick in the following year. For those affected who had to be ventilated in the hospital, it was even an average of 190 days. In comparison, every TK-insured worker was reported unfit for work for an average of 14.6 days last year, it said. For 2021, TK calculated 234,656 days of absence for its insured persons due to long-Covid. That was a total of 0.35 percent of all absences. For 2020, the health insurance company even calculated around 1.3 million days of absence due to a corona disease. However, these figures were based “on proven incapacity to work”. Many employees with long-Covid symptoms such as severe fatigue did not even take sick leave.
Christian Gogoll, lung specialist at the Evangelische Lung Clinic Berlin and co-author of the medical guidelines for long-Covid, advises those affected to get help as early as possible. “Long-Covid is a disease with many faces, so there is no ‘one’ right treatment method,” said Gogoll, himself a Long-Covid patient. The TK also pointed out that the term long-Covid is commonly used for long-term consequences of a corona infection, even if complaints that last longer than twelve weeks after infection or occur again are referred to as a post-Covid diagnosis.