Germany entered a recession last year because the average worker needed 20 sick days

Pitting public health against economic health is fundamentally wrong and will lead to the utter destruction of both

A new study from Germany confirms what COVID-informed doctors, researchers, patients and allies have been expecting for years: record high sick days in 2023 pushed the nation into economic recession.

From N-TV’s write-up:

In 2023, sick leave in Germany once again exceeded the record level of 2022, pushing the German economy into recession. This is reported by the "Rheinische Post" with reference to a study by the Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (VFA): "Significant work absences led to considerable production losses - without the above-average sick days, the German economy would have grown by almost 0.5 percent," according to the study, which has not yet been published. As it was, however, the economy shrank by 0.3 percent. "If sick leave had not been so high again, an additional 26 billion euros would have been generated in 2023. Instead of a mild recession, there would have been an increase of just under half a percent in 2023," write authors Claus Michelsen and Simon Junker, according to the report.

In addition, health insurance has lost five billion euros in the past two years due to the enormous sick leave, and the sick leave has also led to tax losses of 15 billion euros.

For those who have been following the flood of data showing myriad, serious health impacts of COVID infection, this news comes as more of a grim confirmation than a shock.

Twenty sick days is four full work weeks off sick of fifty-two. And twenty sick days was the average- meaning many German workers took more. This data, unsurprisingly compiled by a suffering health insurance firm rather than the state, confirms what we’ve all anecdotally experienced: that the “new normal” of “living with COVID” is not so much normal as it is new.

Impacts of unmitigated, constant COVID spread at the national and global level does not end with acute infection and short-term absences. Yes, the average person is contracting COVID between 1-2 times a year; that alone would be a massive new burden on the economy. But COVID also carries a high risk of long-term illness that can be disabling. It impacts your organs and can lead to death months after infection. It damages the immune system and leaves you vulnerable to other pathogens. It causes cognitive damage and can lead to new onset mental illnesses. Like watching climate impacts compound, year after year after year, this will continue to worsen.

Someone with a heart weakened four times by four COVID infections is higher risk for a post-COVID heart attack than the same individual with no prior COVID infections. What happens when the average person has had ten infections? How about twenty?

While the average person- subject as they have been to years of COVID-minimizing propaganda- may not understand that unmitigated disease spread carries a cascade of economic impacts, they can certainly observe those impacts in day-to-day life. People are complaining of being ill, more frequently and for longer periods of time, losing work hours and pay. People are wondering at the pace of reinfections occurring in young children, which also contributes to lost labor hours as parents stay home with sick kids. Teachers are noting that children are falling behind grade level, unable to read, and data confirms that test scores are dropping. People are complaining about bad service, staff shortages, flight delays, tour cancelations. And people are mourning as unusually young friends and family suddenly drop dead.

What people aren’t doing is wearing masks, demanding clean air, or otherwise mitigating. The relationship between continual, forcible COVID reinfection and long-term social and economic consequences- from the annoying to the tragic to the catastrophic- has been purposely obscured.

Since 2020, including during the Trump era when press outlets still challenged policies of abandonment to the virus, media players and politicians have framed public health and economic health as opposing goals. Mitigations and protections were labeled “restrictions” and portrayed as punishments, rather than collective care empowering us to protect and save one another. Republicans, from day one, were on TV encouraging the vulnerable to die for the economy.

Among them was Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, who famously stated that grandparents would happily lay down their lives for the health of the American economy. The problem here isn’t just that it’s morally reprehensible for a society to throw elders in the garbage because money; it’s also that sickening, disabling and killing people at scale will never help the economy.

Lt. Gov. Patrick’s comments, now the default attitude of the entire political spectrum, betray an arrogant ableism that seeks to destroy “the vulnerable” while leaving the superior, healthy people untouched. The plan was: reopen the economy, the weak people die, everyone else thrives in a stronger, healthier world of Übermenschen. Sadly for the aspiring Lords of Superior Humanity, such a dichotomy never existed; it particularly doesn’t exist after several years of recurrent infections with a heart, brain and immune system damaging virus.

In my piece about manufacturing consent for unending, recurrent infections, I talk about the media’s construction of an artificial out-group, which continually expanded and now comprises everyone harmed by COVID: past, present and future. If your health is harmed or destroyed by COVID, you are no longer part of the oft-mentioned “most people” who have nothing to fear from the virus. Now you are “other”. Your fate cannot inspire people to take precautions, because you are not like them. You may be pitiable and unfortunate, but you aren’t a canary in a coal mine. This circular logic undergirds people’s refusal to confront their inherent vulnerability to bodily harm in spite of building, blinding evidence of this harm.

Rather than limiting its damage to the so-called “vulnerable”, COVID reinfections continue to create more vulnerable people. Yes, the most vulnerable surely were killed at an alarming clip during the initial reopening; but twenty sick days a year for the average worker speaks to the failure of this blood sacrifice to save the rest of us. There was never a binary between “people who can be harmed” and “people who can’t be harmed” by SARS-COV-2; the public was simply encouraged to believe this in order to break our solidarity.

The “kill the vulnerable to save the economy” approach was first favored by the Koch network of shadowy libertarian thinktanks and neatly summarized in the famous Great Barington Declaration. The open letter, roundly repudiated by public health bodies at the time, put forth the argument that abandoning mitigations and fully reopening would exterminate the weak in the short-term, but lead to herd immunity in the long term. In order words, go ahead and infect people; only by letting the public get infected (which, according to the GBD authors, will have to happen eventually), can we hasten our trip back to normality, when most people have immunity to the virus.

The problem with this approach, as we depart yet another gigantic wave of COVID infections that peaked at over 1.5 million cases daily in the US, is that immunity to SARS-COV-2 infection is incredibly short-lived. SARS-COV-2 also mutates at a much faster pace than was hoped, leaving even vaccinated people vulnerable to infection soon after their boosters.

All of the sociopathic calculation behind the idea that “letting it rip” would be “good for the economy” was based on this now obviously false presumption: that herd immunity was achievable. And perhaps if COVID wasn’t an illness people can catch over and over, every few months, the long-term economic outcome might not look so disastrous. But recurrent infections being the reality- and herd immunity being impossible- the mass, unending infection approach carries obvious and compounding economic consequences.

The anti-science herd immunity strategy began with Republicans under Trump, but it has thrived and been mainstreamed by Democrats under Biden. Optimistic interpretation of initial data led then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to claim that vaccines would provide sterilizing immunity; that a vaccinated person would have long-term immunity and could not spread COVID. (Sidenote: this announcement is often memory-holed by the administration as it is starkly inconvenient to their current claims that sterilizing immunity was never a goal of vaccination.)

Thus, the vaccination campaign kicked off the Democrats’ pursuit of herd immunity, which bore no more fruit than the Republicans’. Vaccine mandates were not an authoritarian punishment intended to poison anti-vaxxers or turn them into 5G conductors. Vaccination mandates are an integral part of a successful herd immunity strategy. It’s also why you’ll see those mandates begin to relax and unwind; with herd immunity unachievable, the individual vaccination status of others is far less critical to collective health.

In other words, Democrats are now well aware that the herd immunity strategy via vaccination, like herd immunity via infection, and then the subsequent, short-lived “rich hybrid immunity” strategy- have all failed.

So now I come to the implications of failed herd immunity, ongoing reinfection, and serious, common, long-term health impacts of COVID, which should strike fear into the heart of every investor, every boss, every landlord, every pundit, and every politician: economic impacts of COVID are only just beginning and will continue to spiral downward. The damage will be cumulative, irreversible, and it will destroy the workforce.

I’ve noted in the past that it is the business press, not progressive outlets, who seem to be closely monitoring the mountains of incoming evidence around long-term health impacts of COVID. Like the German insurance company frustrated by record-high illness, it is actuaries, insurers, and business analysts who are raising alarms about rates of heart attacks, early deaths, disability, recurrent illness and more.

Like the impacts of climate change, these long-term impacts of degenerating health among workers will show up in various charts and analyses years before their full impact is felt by the market. Right now, the Dow Jones is buoyed by a false sense of investor security that does not account for the long-term impacts of recurrent infections; however, perception can only outrun fundamentals for so long.

The libertarians behind our failed COVID approach- the ones that successfully laundered their “let it rip” strategy through media outlets hellbent on supporting Biden’s premature declaration of the end of the pandemic- bet the house on a false hypothesis that can’t but produce recession in the long-term. They went all-in on the gamble that mass infection would lead to mass protection. They lost. The rest of us will be paying the compounding interest on this bet until we finally reject their failed approach and implement mitigations.