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Sick Time Policies To Blame For Flu Outbreak?

Leonid Mamchenkov /Flickr

Southwest Florida joined the rest of the country in weathering a tough flu season the past several weeks.

Lee Memorial Health System reported hundreds of cases flooding its four hospitals.

While this year saw a particularly nasty strain of the flu, another one of the big reasons the flu season is particularly bad this year may be that not enough people stay home when they get sick.

Part of the reason for that is that they don’t have paid sick days.

Joyce Chastain is the president of the HR Florida State Council, which is a group that includes the state’s leaders in human resource management. She says this can be a giant public health problem.

“When there are individuals that aren’t offered salary continuation or sick leave, their incentive is to come to work—to work through whatever illness they have,” Chastain says. “They are also less likely to go to a physician for what’s considered to not be a life threatening illness. So, they may not even know they have the flu.”

She also says that waitresses, hotel workers and other tourism workers, who have increased contact with people, are most likely to not have paid sick time. In a state like Florida, that’s a real problem during flu season.

State Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs, and the Florida Chamber of Commerce have said they will pursue a bill this year that stops any local government in the state from requiring employers to offer earned-pay sick time to their workers.

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Ashley Lopez is a reporter forWGCUNews. A native of Miami, she graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a journalism degree.