Statistics Canada says 1.5 million people booked off work with flu in November

Statistics Canada estimates that nearly 21 million hours of work were lost in November due to the flu.

It says 1.5 million employed people reported they were absent from work that month as a result of the H1N1 flu or seasonal flu.

That’s roughly nine per cent of all working people between the ages of 15 and 69.

In the same month, 600,000 people put in 8.6 million extra hours at work as a result of the flu but the net effect was a loss of 20.9 million hours in November.

Statistics Canada was commissioned to measure the impact of the H1N1 flu pandemic and the more normal seasonal flu over a three-month period, starting with November.

The agency estimates the hours lost to flu in November were comparable to the major power outage in August 2003, which affected Ontario and several U.S. states.