Roughly 1.5 million American workers called in sick in December. In November, that number hovered around 1.6 million; and the month before that, it was 1.3 million, according to data released this month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2022, the average number of people taking sick leave was 1.58 million per month, adding up to a total of about 19 million for the entire year. The last time the government recorded an absent-from-work figure in the six-digit range, it was November 2019. But rather than decreasing as the worst of the COVID pandemic abated last year, people missed work at a higher rate than has been seen in decades, with the most absentees since the bureau began keeping track of such statistics in 1976. The phenomenon known as long COVID is likely to have played a part in the spiking data, with a Brookings Institution fellow telling The Guardian on Sunday that she estimated the illness “is keeping somewhere around 500,000 to a million full-time-equivalent workers out of work.”