Just out of curiosity, do you recall how many days they'd been working on their first sick day?
One of my non-scientific-at-all observations:
sick day at about 1 month: borderline
sick day at much less than 1: danger
sadly no.
best of luck to wherever he lands... he's a great actor. for the past year, he had half the company feeling like he was indispensable when everyone who actually worked with him directly knew he did absolutely nothing. numerous times, when he called out sick, he claimed to be working from home (but didn't do any work outside of maybe sending an email or two telling other people to do stuff)
took many final straws before management finally clued in, though. I'd like to hope that they've been building a case to fire him with cause to avoid having to pay unemployment.