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Notes -
In all honesty, it was probably because of the Middle East conflagration going on over the new years that Austin's absence slipped through the cracks.
Austin's surgeries, both the deliberate and the follow-up, coincided with the federal government's end-of-year functional shutdown where employees are expected/encouraged/enabled to maximially disperse to spend the holidays with family. While the upper echelons of the US federal government do maintain a degree of 24/7 operations, it's very much a skeleton crew / 'as needed' sort of deal, and senior executives can more or less accept varying degrees of staffing degradation to let people go for the holidays. The significance of the New Years date of his follow-on surgery isn't just that it's a general holiday, but that the first week in January is always low/partial manning as well, and generally a 'nothing is expected to get done' week as various holiday leave/vacation types are expected to filter back in across the week. People who took New Years instead of Christmas absences, inevitable flight delays/cancellations, etc. The 4 days it took to be widely reported just-so-happened to be the days where general absences are most expected, and thus not the sort of obviously-unusual absence in abstract- especially since Austin's 22DEC absence for medical reasons already primed the defense establishment to operate without him in the direct loop.
The reason why the Red Sea issue likely contributed to obscuring recognition is that the Secretary of Defense is a policy-role, not an operational role, and the Red Sea issue is, well, an operational issue- and one that was already being managed/run at the sub-secretary level before Austin's return to the hospital. The White House has direct military lines of communication for this sort of thing- especially via the Joint Chiefs or the Combatant Commander directly- and so if/as they need theater-specific updates rather than policy updates, they not only could get updates directly from the theater, but likely already were... not least because that was probably how Austin had things set up before his initial surgery, on 22DEC, i.e. right before the Christmas downtime.
If I had to wager what happened, the contingency reporting channels not requiring Secretary of Defense involvement were almost certainly established before the Christmas period so that Secretary Austin wasn't needed to be in the loop, and were part of the skeleton crew's 'normal duty' for the entire Christmas-leave period. Since the procedures were already established, they were simply maintained, and the people doing the maintaining weren't the ones who would normally be reporting SecDef changes in status. Since the situation assessments/daily flows/briefings were still flowing from the DoD via the same non-Austin channels that they would have been during the Christmas period when he was also absent, his continued absence wouldn't have been obvious on either end.
None of this should detract from whether it should have been tracked better, but Austin obviously already released a lot of his staff who normally would have been present/sharing the news over the holidays, and the DoD reporting infrastructure was almost certainly already set up to not require him over the calendar period where he wasn't present.
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