They’ll “go home soon”, your colleague promises. After they’ve finished coughing up a week’s worth of flu all over your desk. After they’ve conducted a day of meetings in the hushed, hollow tones of someone whose cat has just been incinerated by the bin men. The cat is fine. It’s at home, napping on an unopened box of Kleenex, waiting for your bug-ridden colleague, crushed by the weight of her cold, to take her place on the sofa in front of This Morning. So why aren’t they?

In terms of germs, it’s been  a bad winter. How many people do you work with right this minute who “just can’t shift this cold”? A variety of super-resilient bugs are hanging out in our office ventilation systems, waiting to pounce on the weak.

And still we soldier on. According to a report published by insurance company Aviva, 70% of us now refuse to skip work when we’re sick – even though we desperately need to. Think you know an office illness martyr? These days we’re pretty much all martyring, jogging along on the hamster wheel, coughing and spluttering through our 9-5s. The Stylist team have their own horror stories. Like fainting in reception due to the pain of a torn ligament and having to get an Uber in every day because walking was impossible. Having to halt a commute to vomit outside Buckingham Palace and being filmed by tourists. Taking  a work call while trapped in a railway station toilet with particularly bad cystitis. And sitting sideways at your desk, ignoring a throbbing insect bite, only to find you are about to get septicaemia and need an immediate operation. All of these stories are absolutely true. It’s ironic, that in an age where the words wellness and self-care are bandied about regularly, no one  is taking care of themselves when  it really matters. Question is, why?

“I hate calling in sick, I see it as failure,” a friend recently confessed when I asked why she’d dragged herself into the office with a freshly broken elbow, the plaster cast barely dried. “The doctor was happy to sign me off, but I just thought people at work would think I was shirking as I’m right-handed,” she justified.

To evaluate why we won’t stay at home to suffer, we can largely put the blame on the pressures and expectations currently being foisted upon us in the modern workplace. In a study conducted by the University of East Anglia, research cited high job demands, stress and job insecurity as being among the main reasons why people drag themselves into work when they’re unwell.

“Sometimes it’s just not worth the hassle,” says one 33-year-old finance manager at a London bank when I asked several professional women to speak frankly about taking time off sick. “There’s always something in the calendar, one meeting that can’t be cancelled, so I tell myself I can’t possibly stay at home. When there’s always too much work, taking recuperation time feels a bit pointless – it usually means going back to worse.”

Why going to work sick is our unhealthiest obsession yet