The number of people who have been on

sick leave in December due to contagion or isolation due to the covid -

presumably mostly due to the

omicron

variant - amounts to

566,175

, more than double the official figure released by the Government until December 23, as reported to this medium by the

Association of Mutual Accidents at Work (AMAT).

It was the

Ministry of Social Security

that on Tuesday, January 4, reported that in the first twenty days of December a total of

240,011 casualties

due to covid-19 had been registered, without distinguishing between those infected and those isolated by quarantine.

Although the figure was much higher than those that were out in November and October (75,861 and 34,111, respectively), it was striking because it was very low, given that the number of positives and the accumulated incidence has not stopped growing in The last weeks.

Every day more than 100,000 new infections are added.

Despite the fact that many of the infected who have the option of

teleworking

have chosen this route due to the mildness of the symptoms, there are many professions in which

presence is inevitable

, hence the number of casualties was striking.

AMAT has calculated, however, that in December the casualties due to covid amounted to

566,175,

632% more than in November and more than double what the Government has registered.

The association has called the wave of casualties a "tsunami" and does not expect it to subside in the first weeks of January.

As he told this newspaper, the mutuals "are still collecting and processing data" from the first days of 2022.

"The mutuals send us the data to AMAT little by little, from the general to the particular, so we

do not yet have a report on the losses in January

," they explain.

Although they cannot break down how many of these workers are salaried workers and how many are self-employed, the

Association of Self-Employed Workers (ATA

, the most representative in the sector) does have an estimate that a total of

300,000 self

-employed have had to request a leave so far. sixth wave,

until January 5

.

"The data of 240,000 people on leave is unreal,

because it does not take into account the period from December 23 to 31, eight days in which the incidence has multiplied by three," said

Lorenzo Amor

, president of

ATA

.

The vice president of the CEOE

questions that with so many infections the number of sick people is so low

.

"If there have been a million infections, it makes little sense that there are only 500,000 casualties, because on top of that there are casualties due to infections and isolation," he points out.

Bottleneck in processing

The explosion has been generalized

in all sectors of activity

: industry, commerce, hospitality, office and office sector, professionals ... agriculture being the sector in which so far there have been fewer freelancers affected, according to ATA calculations.

Lorenzo Amor explains that the situation is especially serious for the

self-employed or micro-companies with few workers

.

"The big problem is that in Spain 3 million companies have less than 5 workers, so that when there is a contagion of a self-employed person and one or two workers, that company has a problem opening those days," he laments.

The

health sector and nursing home staff

is one of the groups most affected by the omicron variant and in which the casualties are growing the most, with the tension that it represents for the workforce.

The Primary Care staff is also overwhelmed by the

processing of registrations and cancellations

itself .

To alleviate this situation, AMAT asks that physicians can

simultaneously issue a discharge report and a discharge report

with the date on which that person should be able to return to work (generally seven days later), to try to alleviate the "neck of bottle".

Only those patients who were still infected after a week should contact the health center again.

At the end of December, the mutuals estimated that there were more than

340,000 sick leave processes in force,

highs in the pandemic and 40,000 more than in the worst moments of the health crisis in March 2020.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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