There are fewer and fewer patients with long-term covid, except in sectors such as healthcare and education. Occupational health and safety service provider Arbo Unie sees this, which has also noticed that people with long-term covid are staying sick longer.
Their reintegration is also not going well, according to Arbo Unie, which works for about 1.2 million employees at more than 12,000 organizations.
In the first quarter, absenteeism of patients with long-term covid fell by 40 percent in most sectors compared to a year earlier. But half have been sick for more than a year now. Last year that was still one third of all patients.
Much unknown about the course of long-term covid
Corné Roelen, occupational physician at Arbo Unie and professor of occupational medicine at the University of Groningen, emphasizes that much is still unknown about the course of long-term covid and what the best way to recover is. “Usually company doctors advise sick employees to gradually build up their own work in time and tasks.”
That does not work with long-term covid, Roelen knows. The course of the disease is often erratic and ‘physical and mental condition’ often remain very low. This ensures that ‘patients have difficulty functioning at home, let alone at work’. But often ‘suddenly there comes a moment when things are rapidly improving and people reintegrate fairly quickly’.
Prolonged covid therefore requires ‘a lot of flexibility from employers to offer employees space to recover at their own pace’.
Short absence back to standard
Apart from long-term covid, normal, short-term absenteeism has returned to pre-coronavirus levels. At the end of last year, absenteeism was still high, but that was due to a flu wave that has now come to an end.