At least, things aren't back to normal *here*. I don't have time to figure out if things are back to normal where you are. Maybe they are. If so, good for you.

Let's look at it first in terms of sickness. Not many organisations publish their sickness absences. But fortunately the largest employer in my country, NHS England, publishes theirs.

Random fact: The NHS is actually the seventh largest employer in the entire world. Which is great, because it means they have a huge number of employees which means lots of data to work with.

Because it's so large, it's representative of the working population, to some degree. The data comes from here: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-an...

And you can download it yourself and check it all out by scrolling down to here and finding it:

Here's a little graph I made from some of the data. It's the monthly sickness rate in the 'ambulance' section of NHS England.

You can make it too. Go to Table 3 along the bottom. Select the data for the dates and the data for the monthly sickness rate by organisation for ambulance, and insert, and recommended charts, and line chart and bingo, there you are.

This stuff isn't secret or mysterious. You don't have to have a degree to do this stuff.

So there you go, you get this graph. It's a bit jiggly jaggly because you get seasonal causes of illness - things like flu and rsv circulate each year.

There's all sorts of things you can see in there. That data goes back to 2010, so you can see stuff like the fact that there's a curious high trough in the summer of 2014. For some reason the levels of absence didn't drop in the normal way. Someone may know why, but not me.

Let's just look at the period leading up to the covid pandemic.

What can you see there? I can see a general drop in the average... a general drop in the height of the peaks... and a general drop in the height of the troughs. People were slowly spending less time off work sick.

Do I know why? No. But I do know what happened next.

Yep. The pandemic.

And for the folk who don't know, each of those spikes is a covid wave. Not a lockdown, or a vaccine, or a solar flare, or a nicholas cage movie.

But while we're being told in the media that covid is over, and things are back to normal, do things look like they're back to normal when you look at absences in the ambulance organisations?

NOT YET. Not by any means.

You can smooth that graph out too, to remove the seasonal peaks. Create a new column on that page in E, then add a little formula in to add the twelve months of the year and divide by 12, and you get a rolling average. Copy that cell's contents to all the column above...

Then you get a rolling average, so each data point is the average of the preceding 12 months absences. Here's your new graph. Back to normal? No. Not at all.

COVID WAVES ARE CAUSING HUGE INCREASES IN ABSENCES NOW.

And look where the troughs are... the *best times now* are worse than the *worst times then*. That is just nuts.

Maybe that's just ambulance drivers, though, right? Maybe they're a sickly bunch.

Flick to Table Two. This data only goes back to 2017, but let's make some graphs out of those sickness rates by staff grade: HCHS doctors, all grades. Is it back to normal? Is it over? Again... those peaks are all covid waves. EVERY ONE.

Is Covid over for Specialty Registrars? Remember: EVERY PEAK ON THE GRAPH IS A COVID WAVE, INCLUDING THE MOST RECENT LONG BULGE. It's almost a doubling in the rate of sickness from pre-covid.

And, again, you might want to come into this and blame vaccines or lockdowns. The lockdowns (which were short and not absolute) stopped these two peaks from going through the roof. The first would have been twenty times worse.

And, again, the first peak there is before vaccines were introduced. The second peak was partly prevented by the vaccine roll-out.

But, sadly, the vaccines don't actually prevent all illness. So Covid waves are still causing massive waves of absence.

I'm off to a meeting, I'll be back with more afterwards.

Let's get a whole load of these out the way: (apologies for the random 'HCHS' on some of these graph titles)

And a few more: