It will not be until the balances of the mutual societies that collaborate with Social Security are known when it will be possible to know with certainty the cost that sick leaves are causing this year to public coffers. Not in vain, the mutual societies manage around seven out of every ten euros that the social protection system allocates to workers who suffer a temporary disability. However, the advance of the data from the managing entities and the central services does allow at least to get an idea of the trend. In this sense, and in national data, sick leaves have cost to date practically 4,105 million euros, a sum that represents 15% more than at this same point last year, a significant increase that gives an idea of the impact of the coronavirus also in this matter. Of those more than 4,000 million, exactly 36.6 million euros correspond to the disbursement in favor of patients with Covid-19 and people isolated for having been in contact with infected people. Of course, it must be remembered that the impact of the pandemic on the labor market far exceeds the cost of sick leaves, almost anecdotal compared to the expenditure on ERTE and social benefits, which are on the rise due to the increase in unemployment.
More than 11,000 Canary Island workers were on sick leave due to the coronavirus between March and April, the first two months of the pandemic. The national state of alarm to contain the advance of Covid-19 was decreed on March 14 and came into effect at 00.00 hours the following day. Even before that moment, the Ministry of Labor, Migration and Social Security had clarified that both workers infected by the virus and those who had to remain isolated for having come into contact with sick people would have the same consideration as those who suffer a work accident for the purposes of sick leave.
At first, the intention was that preventive isolates, not necessarily sick, would be treated as if they suffered a temporary disability due to common contingencies, such as, for example, a cold or seasonal flu. However, finally the Government rectified so that the amount of the benefit to be collected by these asymptomatic isolates reached 75% of the regulatory base charged to public coffers.
If this had not been the case, this group would not have received a single euro for the first three days of sick leave, 60% between the fourth and twentieth day and only from that moment would have received 75% of the regulatory base, although the equivalent of the first fortnight of sick leave would have had to be disbursed by the company. How many Spaniards have been in this situation? Around half a million in the initial and hardest two months of the pandemic, according to data just published by the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration. In the Autonomous Community there were exactly 11,139 workers.
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