Factsheet: New study shows that emergency paid sick leave reduced COVID-19 infections in the United States

Key takeaways

• Paid sick leave is an important public health tool in the fight against COVID-19, reducing infections by 400 cases per day in states that previously had no paid sick leave guarantee.
• Extending paid sick leave benefits beyond December 2020, when the current emergency benefits expire, would ensure that the United States has this necessary public health tool for the duration of the pandemic.
• If more people are eligible for paid sick leave, including people employed by larger firms who are currently ineligible for emergency paid leave under the new law, then it is likely even more cases would be prevented.

About this new study in Health Affairs

• Looking at the period of March 6, 2020–May 11, 2020, the researchers find (opens in a new tab) that states where workers gained new access to guaranteed paid sick leave through the Families First Coronavirus Response Act saw a statistically significant 400 fewer confirmed COVID-19 cases per day.³²⁹ This translates to a 56 percent decrease in infections in these states.
• To arrive at these findings, the authors compared infection rates before and after the passage of the new law in states with existing paid sick leave guarantees (the control group) and states without such a guarantee (the treatment group). The authors also controlled for state populations, testing capacities, state and local policies such as stay-at-home orders, and other geographic and temporal factors. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1

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• These findings are in line with research conducted prior to the pandemic (opens in a new tab) reporting similar 30 percent to 40 percent declines in influenza-like infections following the implementation of various local paid sick leave ordinances.³³⁰
• These findings likely underreport the potential public health benefits of a comprehensive paid sick leave guarantee. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act does not provide sick leave benefits to workers at large firms with 500 or more employees. This provision, along with other exemptions that prevent healthcare workers and emergency responders from accessing this emergency paid leave, carved out 53 percent to 60 percent of the private-sector workforce from the law’s sick leave benefits (opens in a new tab).³³¹ While 89 percent of workers at large firms already have access to paid sick leave (opens in a new tab) through their employers, that leaves an estimated 6.5 million workers without any employer-provided sick leave (opens in a new tab).³³²

Policy implications

• Extending access to emergency paid sick leave through 2021 would ensure that the United States benefits from this important public health tool through the expected duration of the pandemic. Currently, access to emergency paid sick days is set to expire on December 31, 2020, yet experts say the pandemic will stretch on past that date (opens in a new tab).³³³ Additionally, a permanent paid sick leave guarantee, such as the one proposed in the Healthy Families Act (opens in a new tab), would ensure that workers can keep these protections beyond the current public health crisis.³³⁴

• Expanding access to emergency paid sick leave could yield even greater public health benefits than those identified in this latest study. Closing the coverage gap for workers at large firms would likely yield even greater public health benefits. The HEROES Act (opens in a new tab), passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 15, 2020, would eliminate this carve out for large businesses.³³⁵

Conclusion

Building on prior research on the public health and economic benefits of paid leave, this new study demonstrates that sick leave through the Families First Coronavirus Response Act played an important role in flattening the curve of COVID-19 transmissions in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.³³⁶ Expanding and extending access to these benefits could have critical public health implications in 2021 and beyond.

The Health Affairs study presents early insight into how paid leave is supporting public health in the COVID-19 pandemic, and new data-driven evidence of the importance of paid leave, with support from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, will enable researchers to continue studying how paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave can support workers, public health, and the economy in years to come.³³⁷