In the second half of 2021, the sickness certificates presented by Italians reached a total of 12.8 million. A small boom recorded by the INPS Disease Observatory which attests that 78.2% of certificates come from the private sector, with an overall increase compared to the same period of 2020 equal to 18.5%. Numbers that could be affected, at least in part, by the reduction in smart working which, as various experts point out, contributes to reducing the rate of employee absences due to leave and sickness. In detail, between 2020 and 2021 smart workers decreased from about 8-9 million, in full lockdown, to more than 7 due to the gradual return to the office. This could have affected the management of the disease but also the increasing infections in the workplace. In the third quarter of 2021, despite the intense vaccination campaign – writes the INPS – the resumption of all activities and the lesser use of agile work, led to greater circulation of the virus, and consequently, the certification of illness has had a marked increase referring, also to the protection of quarantines and fragile subjects.
The boom of the third quarter
Returning to sickness certificates and INPS data, the jump concerns in particular the sickness certificates of the third quarter of 2021, compared to the same figure of 2020, which recorded an increase of 33.5%having gone from 3.5 million in 2020 to 4.7 million in 2021. As regards the fourth quarter of the two years under comparison, the number of certificates instead goes from 7.2 million in 2020 to 8.0 million in 2021 , with a more contained increase (+ 11.2%), even if decidedly higher than that recorded in the pre-pandemic years.
Geographical and gender distribution
The distribution by geographical area is also uniform (33.3% in the north, 36.5% in the center and 31.5% in the south) and by gender (34.3% males, 32.5% females). On the other hand, there are important differences when looking at the age group. Surprisingly, the increase is much higher for the younger ones (67.8% in the class `up to 29 years) and much less for seniors (21.2% for the class ’50 years and over’). As regards the fourth quarter, in 2021 the increase in medical certificates compared to the same period of the previous year is more important in the public sector (+ 17.2%) than in the private sector (+ 9.4%) and greater importance for women (+13.4) compared to men (8.9%). Also in this case, there is an increase in certificates for young people, compared to older workers.
Controls and the Covid effect
The overall control visits were 258,249 in the third quarter and 311,001 in the fourth with a much higher incidence for public workers (in the fourth 99 visited every 1000 certificates compared to 19 in the private sector). Workers with at least one day off were 2.65 million in the third quarter and 4.27 in the fourth. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 211,390 reports of accidents reached Inail due to infection from Covid in the workplace, and of these 20,344 arrived in January 2022. There were 823 reports of fatal accidents, 12 of which arrived in January but all referring to previous months. Reports of accidents due to contagion have been equal to one sixth of the total number of accidents reported since the beginning of the pandemic and 1.9% of the infections reported to the ISS. Fatal cases are a quarter of the deaths at work reported in the period and 0.6% of the national deaths from Covid.