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Comment by xen0 | Hacker News Reader

The reported average of 20 days is likely skewed by a small number of long leaves and I suspect* is nowhere near typical for the median worker (it's nearly taking a day off every two weeks).

Longer leave already requires a doctor's approval so the proposal to require that for all leave is unlikely to change much other than drown doctors in more busy work.

*I can't find much for the 'median' amount of leave taken per year.

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That's exactly right.

This article [1] mentions 40% of sick days being from people with long-term (> 6 weeks) illnesses. That's data from one of Germany's large insurers. While I don't know the proportion of those with long-term illnesses, if we assume it's at most 10%, then the average for people with "normal" short-term illnesses is at most 12 days. So much lower.

[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sind-die-deutschen-wirklich-h...

> from one of Germany's large insurers

Is this voluntary insurance? It changes meaning to the statistic to % from those that made an insurance.

I assume you mean there might be a self-selection issue with people who are voluntarily ("privately") insured, as compared to those who have the normal state-mandated ("gesetzlich") insurance?

This data is from AOK which is one of the state-mandated insurers. It insures around 2M people, and my gut feeling is that they are not terribly unrepresentative of the workforce as a whole.

But of course the point is, everyone with a tiny bit of true data could tell much more precise stories, and the journalists (as usual) didn't care or didn't think it would fly with readers.

AOK insured 27 million in 2021, couldn't find a more recent number.

Whoops, misread the digit! Thanks for catching.

But the numbers are still the same (it's about rates not counts), just that we can expect the 40% figure to be more accurate than with 2M.

In Germany you need an insurance, but you can choose which one. In Berlin at least I remember TK was the default, but you can choose others.

For clarification, “default” above doesn’t mean “In Berlin you get insured with TK by default”, and rather “Most people in Berlin will recommend choosing TK over a different state-mandated insurer”. TK was also very popular when I was back in university in Frankfurt. It might just still be the one with reasonable prices!

IIRC you can move from TK to others freely, but if you move to some options there are conditions to come back.

TK service via email, phone, etc is amazing, even if your German is not very good, as it was the case for me the first year.

In Germany there’s private insurance which can only be chosen by people of higher salary and good health because the rate depends on their condition when they sign up. So this data would be biased towards sick people, people doing jobs that are more likely to make you sick, and people who are financially less well off.

I guess they do not understand the relevance of the median in this. They just take the average and think it is "good enough"...

To be fair, the median is just as little information as the mean. We live in a world where ink is cheap, they should just show a histogram.

in this case the median matters a lot more. most people either get sick for a couple days to weeks with something like the flu, or get a more serious illness/injury like a complex fracture that takes them out for months. the first type is much more common but the long leave cases push up the mean.

That’s what the article is saying but there is no way that maths out with legit long term sick.

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