Paid Sick-Leave: Is It a Good Way to Control Epidemics?

This research considers an economic intervention i.e. a paid sick leave policy to control an Influenza epidemic. Research has shown that “presenteeism” i.e. sick workers coming to work, costs employers more than “absenteeism” because sick workers put their coworkers at risk and are less productive. We examined the costs and benefits of a paid sick leave policy through its effect on productivity, medical costs and attack rate. We considered two kinds of workers’ behavior: honest and rational. Honest workers take sick leave for days they are sick; but rational workers take all available sick leave. We ran agent-based epidemic simulations on large scale social contact networks with individual behavior modeling to study the coevolution of policy, behavior, and epidemics, as well as their impact on social welfare. Our experimental results indicate that if the workers behave honestly, the society’s economic benefits increase monotonically with the number of paid sick days, however if the workers behave dishonestly but rationally, the society’s welfare is maximized when the number of paid sick days is equal to the number of mean days of sickness. This research shows that paid sick leave can be used as an effective policy instrument for controlling epidemics.