You can treat yourself at home for three days, after that you need to go to a German doctor for a certificate
As Deutsche Welle notes, this is partly because in Germany it is, so to speak, easy to be sick. Salary is fully maintained for six weeks in this case. But even after that, health insurance funds pay. Moreover, at many enterprises, you can not come to work for the first three days of illness without taking sick leave. It is enough just to notify the employer.
And this, by the way, is far from the most liberal option. In Sweden and the United Kingdom, for example, a medical certificate is mandatory only on the eighth day of illness; before that, management must take the employee at their word. True, if the employee begins to abuse this, they may be required to provide a sick note from the first day. And they must provide it.
It must be said that in private firms, especially small ones where every person counts, those who stay home too often for two or three days citing ill health are treated less leniently than, say, in large public-sector organizations. And it is no coincidence that employees of these organizations (including state institutions, ministries and departments) miss the most working days due to illness – an average of 16 days per year per person. This is almost a third more than the average German working in a private firm.
However, the leaders of German sick leave statistics are not large megacities and regional centers, where public-sector organizations at the federal and state levels in Germany are mainly concentrated, but relatively small towns – primarily in the industrial Ruhr region. These are Gelsenkirchen, Herne, Hamm, Hagen, Bochum, Oberhausen, Solingen. Here the average number of missed working days per year exceeds two dozen.
It is interesting, by the way, why exactly Germans take sick leave. This, incidentally, is known only to health insurance funds, because doctors do not indicate the diagnosis on the sick note and the employer does not need to know it.
Seven years ago, the majority of work exemptions in Germany were for respiratory diseases, severe colds and acute respiratory infections (a quarter of all sick notes in 2009). But now, ailments of the musculoskeletal system have taken the lead. Acute respiratory infections, mental disorders, various injuries lag far behind. As doctors say, this is a result of work becoming mostly sedentary.